You are most likely reading these words because you had a nightmare, perhaps some weeks or even months ago now, perhaps last night.

I’m going to try to keep this brief, but please understand that I am trying to write something that could be helpful to you, but also to your fellow parents who have also had a nightmare, just like you.

Although I have written as patiently and clearly as I could that I am no longer able to personally interpret dreams at this time, people keep Googling the topic of nightmares about children and I seem to keep showing up in the search—even though I have not been interpreting dreams here for some time.

Still, when people are scared they apparently don’t read much about what I have to say to other dreamers, or that I’m not interpreting dreams at this time—they just spill their dream into the comment box and hope I will read it and tell them what it means.

Please understand that even though I don’t know you, I would like you to be able to feel better. But after interpreting literally hundreds of dreams, staying up late at nights answering inquiries after working full days, I’m hoping maybe someone else might step up as I step back.

That said, let me sign off on interpreting all these nightmares with some overall ideas that you may consider if you still want help with your dream. You will have to take these ideas, however, and then put in some work on your own.

Firstly, you have written your dream down and thus your own written record of it is now here for you to prompt your memory as you circle back to your dream to try and make some sense of it—for your own self. That’s really the best way to interpret your dreams, to work with the material and think about all the random things it brings back into your mind and then, like a puzzle, try to figure out how these random things fit together.

In general I would suggest that dreams are not reliable predictors of the future and so I would encourage you not to take your dream literally as foretelling a tragedy.

Obviously we all want to keep our kids safe and do what we can to protect them. If your dream is telling you that you are unconsciously worried that you are not keeping your child safe, then it would be appropriate to take action to protect your child.

More likely your nightmare is somehow reminding you of your own past traumas or confronting you with the very feelings that you try to avoid in waking life. If this is true, and you have not yet been able to heal from a past trauma or loss or traumatic loss, then perhaps the “message” or “meaning” of the dream is that you are in pain and you need/deserve some therapy or other way of helping yourself resolve your trauma and find a way to move forward. In this case the “meaning” is “get some help” and if you do get some help and the dream stops recurring, then you can appreciate how your unconscious encouraged you to get better (and this helps your kids by giving them a calmer and more confident and happy parent).

When we talk about the “meaning” of dreams we are looking at the situations or things in the dream through the lens of symbolism. Freud was all about this, and it’s interesting stuff, it just doesn’t have much place in science. It does have a place in art and literature.

So whether or not cigars symbolize penises and staircases symbolize sex (I sort of doubt these arcane symbolic interpretations for you the modern dreamer) one thing all these nightmares have in common is that they are about “bad things” happening to “children.”

Thus “bad things” aren’t symbols so much as they are visual representations of feelings (fear, dread, loss, etc) and in these dreams the Unifying Symbol is The Child.

Maybe our children symbolize EVERYTHING. We love them, they frustrate us, we practically die ourselves at the very thought of harm or death involving our children.

So one umbrella interpretation is that a nightmare about our child or children is a symbolic way of feeling the worst possible feeling we could ever imagine. But we don’t really need a nightmare like this in order to know we love our children.

And if that’s so, what’s the point of a brain that scares us for NO GOOD REASON?

Maybe it’s the same as having a worry brain that torments us, tells us we suck, aren’t good enough, don’t have enough, aren’t safe, loved or lovable. This very brain makes us nervous and unhappy but pretty good at survival. That may be both why there are so many more humans than animals (we won the contest to survive); and it may be why humans have such annoying tendencies for selfishness, greed, cruelty and violence… when we don’t feel safe, loved or respected.

If we do feel safe, loved and respected we tend to be pretty social and nice and creative and industrious and generous (it’s just that we too often feel lonely and inadequate instead of loved and respected… even in our own minds, in our own negative opinions of ourselves, in our sleep when our brains cook up nightmares and cast us as victims).

Thus your nightmare might simply be about feeling scared, horrified, out of control, sad, angry, helpless, abandoned, lonely or whatever horrible emotion lead you to Googling nightmares about children. Whatever we may think about our nightmares, what we know is that they make us feel awful.

And so we want an “answer,” that will make us feel safe and good again. But feelings are not facts any more than dreams are waking reality. We can’t solve the riddle, but we can feel the horror and accept the emotional reality that we cannot love our children without the built in risk that bad things could happen and thus horrible feelings could happen.

This seems like the best guess of all, because even if you had trauma, or the superstitious fear that bad things are going to happen, what you most certainly do not want is to feel bad, mad, scared, helpless, sad, lonely, powerless, etc. And yet your unconscious went and made you feel bad.

And this is deeply human: we don’t want to feel lonely, scared, hurt, etc. And yet our own brains have a way of making us feel bad, scared, inadequate, etc.

This could be understood as our “survival brain.” Our biology wants us to survive, and we do survive by staying scared (running from saber-toothed tigers in prehistoric times) and we do survive by never feeling good enough or like we have enough.

Our survival brain does not care if we are happy, its job is to keep us alive—terrified, unhappy, restless but alive.

Happiness happens in a different part of the brain, the part that does Love, and Gratitude and likes hearing music and likes just hanging out with people who are nice. When that part of the brain is working we are not scared about things that are just dreams, and we know the difference between real threats and passing emotions (like nightmares) that are not real threats.

So… when we get scared, sad, “triggered,” into trauma we do not feel safe and we want solutions to our “problem.” We hope that “knowing the meaning” of the nightmare will give us control over it and then we won’t feel scared.

But feelings, including fear, are not “problems to solve.” They are just feelings.

This is not to say that if you were abused, or your kids are being hurt that we shouldn’t take real steps in the real world to heal, to stop cycles of abuse, to protect children from real harm. We just need to differentiate real threats from the ones our brain made up in the night.

So to conclude, if you want to interpret your dream and you want clues about how to do that feel free to read even a few of the hundreds of interpretations I’ve already offered; this way of thinking is like English Class where we could have a discussion about what a novel “means.” Even then, the author is the best person to ask about the meaning of their book, and mostly they will say that they expressed what they meant with the book, and that their unconscious participated in the making of art.

You are the dreamer and so you are the master artist who made a personal horror film in your mind. What it means is known better to you than to me or anyone else, but if you watch the dream you will see your own brilliant ability to scare the hell out of yourself. Realize that you are good at that, and that keeps you alive.

Try to see the artistry in your dream and you may be willing to feel scared, the way you must be willing to feel scared if you watch a horror movie. It lets out steam, makes you feel alive, or glad to wake up, or leave the movie and stumble back out into the light of day. We all must be willing to feel devastating loss if we are going to let love be alive in our lives. When we attach, we could lose; and losing those we love sucks beyond words.

Finally, there is a teacher of cartooning, Lynda Barry, whom I admire (https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/syllabus) and she encourages us to begin drawing by drawing monsters. The logic goes that since monsters are not real, there is no way to “get it wrong.”

In that spirit, I would invite you to re-read your dream and consider drawing a scene from it, or making it into a comic. You could share it back here if you want, and maybe other readers would find it interesting, or make them smile, or feel less alone.

Words, after all, tend to be literal and when our brain tells us, “you are not safe,” it ends up being processed as a terrifying fact instead of a feeling created by the words in our mind; and dreams are so vivid that they become “real” to us, but only when we are sleeping. They are not “real” in terms of waking life, they just “feel so real.”

Ultimately our waking lives might be like some sort of dream we all dream up together. No one person makes the world alone, but we all do make the world’s nightmare problems, and great moments too.

Perhaps if we could turn our nightmares into art, into laughter, into courage to live better experiences than those we dream up in our darkest moments we might all wake up together to a better world.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I sincerely hope it helps.

And if you want to send a picture, I won’t interpret it but I will be happy to look at how your monsters look to you ☺

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http://privilegeofparenting.com/2016/05/02/do-what-you-love/#commentsMon, 02 May 2016 22:25:23 +0000http://privilegeofparenting.com/?p=7225

Hi all! It’s been ages since I have posted anything, but I wanted to say hello to readers who still subscribe to Privilege of Parenting, and welcome to any new readers who may wander by.

when I was blogging about parenting I realized that I ended up giving a fair amount of advice, when mostly I wanted to connect and offer compassion and community. Writing about parenting was an attempt to merge my interest in writing and creativity (and also to make sense of my own creative block and maybe finally break through it) with my interest in psychology and especially in my wish to contribute in a wider way than just direct psychotherapy.

When I started blogging my kids were in elementary school. As I write this post I am about to travel to attend my oldest son’s college graduation; my younger son is nearly finished with his freshman year in college; my wife is back in school studying to become a therapist and my dog isn’t getting any younger… and yet as the house grew quiet I found myself drawing, like when I was a kid.

I have always liked kids’ art, maybe because despite all my attempts to “grow up” I am very much a kid at heart. I am by no means conversant in Nietzsche, but someone who studied philosophy told me that Nietzsche believed that humans needed to live as “artists” by which he meant to be our best Selves, a true expression of our hearts with all their feelings in whatever we “do” in life, more than he meant to paint or write or make music.

I like that idea, and in parenting I tried to be my best Self, but in order to do that I needed to write about it, think about it, talk with others about it, get support and offer support. The blessings do come, over time so it seems, from “leaving it all on the field.” Maybe it’s that transcendent field of all-in commitment, beyond terror and dread, through passion to love that Rumi means when he says, “Beyond right and wrong there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Nietzsche says, “In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”

So many teaching on wisdom speak about balancing opposites; Jung is all about differentiating and relating opposites within the psyche; brain science is all about differentiated parts communicating harmoniously in both “executive function” and also gratitude and present moment awareness. Nietzsche was all about the balance of Apollonian reason and Dionysian passion.

When I think about those I love, and I am pleased to acknowledge that I love a lot of people, I think my favorite things are kindness and authenticity; those are the people who inspire me to keep taking chances and trust that I will be loved even if I fail or end up looking stupid.

It is in this spirit that I wanted to admit that I have been spending my late night hours after full days of work taking an arts class and drawing at my dining room table (a table that I will have to clear for the summer with a full house about to happily constellate).

I ran into a couple of colleagues last fall at a psychology conference, in a breakout seminar on the psychology of procrastination and avoidance. Newsflash: like all anxiety it is about avoidance.

I admitted that I wanted to make a graphic novel, or at least a story, and my colleagues had some projects of their own still not accomplished. We worked to be more conscious of our fears, and agreed to keep supporting the others to check in and keep going.

Then a client brought me a book on cartooning, which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to get more creative but feels intimidated or stuck (Syllabus by Linda Barry); and then my artsy son and my wife saw my drawings and encouraged me to take a class. I was nervous—and I was right to be, if the point is being “good” as it was young people serious about an arts career, and teachers already having arts careers. I was older than the teachers by about 20 years, and nearly 40 years older than the youngest student. But they were awesome—so kind and encouraging—and soon I was just having fun (and working hard—deadlines and structure really help us get things accomplished).

Tonight is the last class, and I know I’m going to miss it. I have to turn my comic book in, which I just finished yesterday (and I’m waiting for Amazon Prime to deliver my “long reach stapler” just in time for the deadline). We also had to make a website to share our art. I wouldn’t have done that either without the assignment and the structure. I’m tired, but I think I might take another class.

I guess I share this for two reasons: 1) to invite you to come read my comic book; and 2) to encourage and inspire any readers who may be feeling a little stuck to let the connections with others be part of the fabric that allows us to create—not necessarily “works” of art, but relationships and experiences that weave us into that “one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”

And in any event, thanks to the many who inspire me with their sincerity and encouragement to keep it real—wishing all who may come upon these words compassion, friendship and creative joy in life well-lived.

I would say, “Happy Martin Luther King Day,” except we’re not there yet. Instead let’s just acknowledge that it’s Martin Luther King Day and admit that we have not yet overcome and that today’s a day to keep on pushing forward on liberty and justice for ALL.

When I left Selma the other night I was so choked up that I could hardly speak for fear of breaking down in tears.

I encourage you to go and see it. Now. In a theater. With other human beings.

As Andy and I filed out of the movie last Saturday night in North Hollywood, the crowd funneled into a little corridor and I fell behind Andy and into line next to a beautiful couple. Maybe it was because they were African American and I couldn’t help but fantasize that we were, if not exactly “marching,” at least walking out of the movie together in a spirit of truth and love. I turned to the man next to me and a few words tumbled out: “When is American going to actually get it?” I asked.

The man looked at me and said, “I keep asking myself the same thing.” His date turned back to me, as we slowed for a moment together in the theater lobby. She smiled and said, “I think a lot of us feel the same way. I think we all have to just speak up.”

I went to film school with Spike Lee, but I don’t think I really and truly got what he was talking about until maybe fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Maybe it took the LA riots, multicultural training, psychology training, working in the trenches of mental health, working in Beverly Hills, parenting or who knows what to get my white Jewish suburban head out of my clueless butt and start to wake up (and maybe I’m still asleep but at least hoping the dream of ignorant and wrong might turn sweet and right).

It was 1988 when Spike made School Daze, and his message was indeed, “Wake up.” It’s still time to wake up. We are not awake.

When it comes to injustice, anger is a proper response, it is how we know something is unfair. Racism rests on ignorance. No one who is truly awake is unjust. It’s safe to say that most of us, or at least myself, are not enlightened, not fully awake. Knowing this is a start. Not knowing things, together, and non-violently, is freedom of speech.

Dr. King was remarkable. He stood for Truth, and his use of non-violence is in perfect alignment with Truth because while lies require liars to tell them, the Truth just is. Justice in any absolute sense, like Truth, is beyond human opinion. The conversation is our right, even our responsibility, but when we get it right all will be free and all will agree that they are free.

When Dr. King kneels on the bridge leading from Selma to Montgomery, a rising tide of Truth behind him, a wretched wall of racism, privilege and hate in front of him, he is like Moses continuing to lead the long march from slavery to true liberty.

Like Moses who himself never gets to the Promised Land, Dr. King helped make something possible, but it’s on us to take it all the way home to our shared world, our collective consciousness.

We may or may not be “Charlie” this week. Freedom of speech, not to mention freedom from slavery, poverty, tyranny, sexism, discrimination, homophobia, brutality, exploitation and hate may remain a dream for far too many, but it’s a dream we can all share (or else perpetuate the nightmare of lying idiot humanity from which we cannot seem to awaken).

I’m hoping that the vast majority of human beings want a peaceful earth. I’m hoping that the vast majority of human beings, if allowed to be educated, safe and free would come to the self-evident conclusion upon which our American Constitution is founded: the equality of ALL.

Love and Truth and Justice are like the water under every bridge. Truth, like Water, is humble, powerful, life-giving and clear to everyone.

Dr. King said, “Wake up” (to his dream of equality) in the 1960s. Spike said, “Wake up” in the 1980s. Ava DuVerny’s, Selma says, “Wake up, dignified and non-violent” right now, although Oscar (which might be made of white gold) didn’t much notice.

The woman in the lobby said, “Speak up.”

And so I am speaking up as an infrequent blogger inspired to voice, but mostly just to say, “Go see Selma.” Vote this Martin Luther King Day with your time, your money, your heart for justice and love—the ingredients that make this movie and that make the world I want to live in.

Of all the imaginary juice joints in the wide world of the child’s mind, it had to be Elliot, Little Elliot who walked into Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle where I was sitting with my legs dangling from a booster seat, trading “what time is it?” jokes with Madeline. Ferdinand was drowsing over a flower as Curious George floated above our kiddie table holding onto his balloons, one of which carried Babar himself, dapper in his green suit.

Some writers haunt the Algonquin, others the White Horse, but new dad on the kid lit block, Mike Curato, knows exactly what time it is: bedtime, when Truth be told so quietly that only the very young and rather old can hear the wind blowin’ in the willows as sweet heads sink into lovingly fluffed pillows.

Ferdinand’s dad, Munro Leaf, said, “Early on in my writing career I realized that if one found some truths worth telling they should be told to the young in terms that were understandable to them.” Amen.

Follow the little polka dotted elephant into, “Little Eliot, Big City,” (especially if you have ever felt unnoticed, which is for whom this tale tolls). Elliot says that there will be other stories coming, but for now I can assure you that Ferdinand has sniffed Elliot’s tail and found that tulip to his liking.

With drawings numinous with fairy dusted brush-strokes indebted to eternal masters, homages drift like cherry blossom petals and post-modern tropes rise like Leaf Men in an hour of need to sound the call for friendship, punctuated with Yayoi polka dots.

Grown-ups may trudge on in the grim business of forgetting where they came from, getting on planes and saving the world, but in a little corner of a juice joint it’s always circle time and that time is neither the beginning nor the ending of a beautiful friendship for the very most beautiful friendships are eternal. Elliot just may be staying indefinitely.

Greetings. Readers of this blog have perhaps noticed that I have been disinclined to write in recent months. When I first leapt into this blogosphere back in 2009, and felt like Sandra Bullock spinning terrified in Gravity, a Wolf, D.A. Wolf, came by like some virtual George Clooney (although with better dialogue to be sure) to gently say hello, as if I were a wallflower in a party without walls, and take me by the hand and get me a virtual drink and introduce me around to a few people.

I’d been thinking about D.A. on a recent day and was therefore more delighted than surprised to get an email from her. Besides saying hello, she invited me to participate in a series she was curating about Fathers and Sons, having recently done one on Mothers and Daughters. Honored and inspired, and instead of thinking (which I’ve been doing a bit too much of lately, especially around 4am), I just started writing. D.A. is encouraging, and a great teacher. She even took time to edit my little essay, for which I deeply appreciate and thank her.

Given that I can’t really keep up with the demand for dream interpretation that I have been receiving and that I don’t have time to organize the material into a proper guidebook to nightmares about our children I have elected to take an interim step: to offer nine blog posts dealing with the most common categories of nightmare with some insights about overall themes and a quick guide to get a reader moving toward nightmares that might most closely resemble their own.

My hope is that if you find the best general category, and then go to that list of dreams which have been organized in terms of the age of the child in the dream, you may find some insights that you can then use to think about your own particular dream (and hopefully feel less afraid and more conscious about what is being stirred up for you and about how you personally discover is best to take care of your own self and your child).

Note that the threads are long and you must be patient in scrolling down through dreams until you find some that match the age or situation of your own dream.

While I realize it is still cumbersome to scroll down through multiple dreams until you reach one matching your child or your theme, my hope is that it will be somewhat easier than the random thread of comments at the original post.

Below you will find a thread of dreams from youngest to older children involving water and drowning. This is the most common category of nightmares I have received from parents so at the very least you are not alone in this nightmare.

Some theories of dreaming include the notion that our brains naturally experience a sinking feeling in our sleep and perhaps we create a water scenario to explain our experience to ourselves. Further, if we somehow know we are not in water, it might make sense to “explain” the sensation to ourselves by imagining that our child (a part of us we care so much about) might be sinking and that is why we feel the way we do, even though we are asleep.

Beyond the science of dreaming we might then delve into the art of interpretation, with water itself being an apt symbol of our own unconscious…

[Please note that I cannot continue to interpret individual dreams at this time, however if you read through these dreams you will very likely find insights into your own dream—and you will discover that you are not alone in having such nightmares.]

Dear Bruce,
I just recently had my first child four months ago an I can’t seem to stop having nightmares. It is really starting to affect me an I don’t know what to think about them. My most recent dream was last night and I was on some beach with cliffs and an a walkway. I was the guide to help people cross the part of the beach where it was dangerous. The waves would come in small but out of no where come in huge and engulf that whole section. It was like a bowl sort of. I started walking with my son in my arms an we got across an into this cave. We were safe and out of nowhere the cave entrance started to fill up with water. I looked at my son an he began crying I tried to swim up but we got surrounded with water. As the cave was filling to the top I could see my son face underwater screaming an then starting to go limp so I began to suck air into him an take the water out even though we were both submerged. The next thing I know I see my son at the top of this hill laying limp in my arms an I start screaming an suddenly my friends an family come an grab him from my arms an hes ok an I’m dead an looking down at my body. I keep having dreams were my son falls into a body of water an starts to drown an I jump to save him an I can’t he will drown or I drown. Any insight would be appreciated this is the fourth dream that has dealt with water. Thank you

I am sorry you are having these nightmares, however, I thank you for sharing them with me. After reading so many of these, combined with my years of clinical work, perhaps some patterns are emerging, at least to me.

It seems the most common dreams have water and drowning or else falling and flying. You are having both. The sensations of falling or weightlessness, as well as dropping down, going deep or drowning, seem to be naturally generated by the brain. In ancient times the visionaries, or shamans, saw the universe as having three levels: upper (the spirit world, flying); normal (waking reality); and lower (the underworld, drowning, hellish experience).

In seeking rational AND compassionate understanding, perhaps the brain generates sensations and then the mind makes up stories to make sense of the sensations. Vaguely knowing that you are not actually drowning, but feeling like you are, your mind comes up with stories to make sense of the sensations.

And while there may be no actual danger to you or your baby, the WAY the mind makes a story offers possible insights into your worries and fears.

My first question might be about what life was like when you were newly born and particularly around four months. Did your mom have an illness, a post-partum depression, did her mom get sick or die?

The imagery of you crossing a narrow cliff between water and land could symbolize that liminal space between inner and outer reality, the place where dreams as well as myth, art, religion and mysticism happen.

You cast yourself as guide and protector, but perhaps when you were a baby you needed a guide and protector. Perhaps you felt like you were drowning in infancy (did you struggle with asthma, pneumonia, a bad-bathtub experience?)

You may not have access to conscious memory about your early infancy, however you may carry the tracings of trauma. You might have some wish to return to the womb (a cave filled with water) and have life breath (spirit) breathed into you by the Mother you have now become. Maybe this dream is about healing some deep wounds of the past, about dying as the mother you once had to be born again as the child you now have, your ego-self serving as conduit between selves, states of mind, states of consciousness?

Perhaps your mom was a little narcissistic, the sort who “sucks the air out of a room,” and you are imagining a way to put the air back in the treasured baby, a symbol of your newly emerging self in a sort of archetypal baptism or rebirth not by patriarchal magic but by matriarchal compassion and sacrifice—not the son dying tragically for man, but the mom dying tragically for baby.

Know that these are symbols, not predictions of disaster. They are, if not random, more likely to be ways of remembering past trauma than crystal balls into pending doom.

I hope these ideas result in you having better dreams. Feel free to let me know how it goes.

I been having dreams for the past couple days about my 3 month old baby boy the first one was of him being taken away dead, I don’t remember the others, but yesterday I had one of him drowning, and tonight again for some reason I was in a car and the car de railed in to a lake or river deep and we landed I grabbed my baby and got out the car swam to ah house with a dad and mom that I did not know, but my brother was there and as I thought I saved my son coming to find out it was a doll baby I grabbed then I went in the water again and grab who I thought was my baby and came out and I told my brother this does not look like my baby so I look out and my baby was there in a boat or the car don’t really remember but he fell in the water andi can hear him crying but for some reason all I can do is tell a woman that was there to get him help please but I couldn’t to help my son as he drowned so I kept yelling right there right there get my baby and then I wake up and my baby is sleeping next to me so I just burst in tears…. I hate this dreams there so hurtful please help calm myself… Thank you

As you can see above, many moms (and some dads) are having similar dreams, so you are not alone. Perhaps there is no official meaning, but we are story-makers so we make dreams up a a natural thing; and we are worriers, it helps keep us alive and helps us protect our children. So perhaps there are several viable ways to think about this terrible dream (and if we “get it right” we will know because you won’t have that dream again).

First hypothesis: your brain, like all of our brains, is prone to generate random firings of neurons when asleep. Some wonder if this moves memory from short term storage to long-term (which is another way of saying consolidate learning). From ancient times mothers need to know to protect babies, this is instinct. Perhaps we “practice” saving them from danger in our sleep so we can be better at saving them if any actual danger arises… perhaps it “puts us on our toes” against danger?

In any event, the random firings of neurons often makes us feel as if we are either floating or sinking. Our brains seem to turn this into flying and falling, up in sky or sinking down into water or earth. This may be the biological basis for our myths of spirit worlds and underworlds.

We are spiritual beings, us humans, and this may be partly about how much we love our children, and how we expand our sense of self through them… and the great gift and beauty of this has a shadow side, the possibility of loss. The loss of a child, even in our dreams or imagination, is so terrible that perhaps it turns us either neurotic or spiritual (or both).

In more psychological terms, the baby could represent the baby part of yourself, and this could mean that inside you feel a little trapped, overwhelmed, symbolically drowning in emotion (hormones, attachment, sleep deprivation, joy and also dealing with the primitive rage and hunger of a baby).

If parenting makes you angry, which is natural, but forbidden to our idealized image of ourselves as super-parents of love, love, love… then the dark secret sneaks out as a dream of harm or loss. This is hard to look at, but the looking at it tends to dispel the bad dreams, and link us to each other as grown-ups in the honest admission that we love our kids, but they vex and deplete us sometimes.

Perhaps in the old-old days the clan was better able to support moms, as parenting is really too much for one parent alone to do optimally.

In your dream the “brother” would be the male part of you who could help, and the new mother and father could be the parents not that you had but that you are becoming. Symbolically, the child (or our identification with the helpless child, victim) must die for our Self to be born as a more full grown-up.

Beyond symbols of loss, growth and change, it is possible that you actually had a difficult early life. In this case your baby and all the love you have may trigger pre-verbal memories about what it felt like to be you as a newborn, and that might have felt scary and overwhelming. This leads to feeling less secure in life, but parenting is a way you may become more secure… by giving what you did not get.

Finally, just as you try to sort out real baby from doll in the dream, our little interchange here may be in the service of sorting out the past from the present, emotion/fear from reality (which is that your baby is safe right now).

As parents we need to be able to hold our own feelings and those of our children (the Great Mother kindness of vast love, but this is like the car trying to hold the lake, or a thimble trying to hold an ocean sometimes); and we have to be able to have limits, boundaries, firmness (the mother bear fierce that is part of nature).

This is hard, and this is worth it; for this we need each other as humans who care about each other and support each other and each other’s children.

Hope you have lots of love around you and that your child is kept safe and secure and happy as a result of it.

Hi Bruce,
I had a dream my family (my wife and our 8 month old baby and I) were like visiting a resort by the water (more like a sea or an ocean) and they had like children’s ride and there was this ride specifically for babies. Our son was crawling around and he crawled into a pod. Once he got it, it activated and moved along the outside of the room and made sounds and then disappeared behind the wall with like a smoke effect and came out on the other side of the room. baby really liked it. my wife went away, maybe 100 yards only. but baby was crawling around again and ended up getting back on a ride. so again he went along the room in that pod and when he went behind the wall …and I was wondering what the ride looks like behind the wall. when he came out from behind the wall on the other side of the room…but he no longer was in a pod and had a very concerned look on his face. and just as he started crying I realized what was wrong…his left arm was cut off. I started screaming and ran and picked up the baby and the arm and was ready to run…but then I woke up.
this freaked me out so much I didn’t even tell my wife about this dream. Please help me understand ….thank you!

Of course this does sound upsetting, but perhaps if you think about it as a window into your own unconscious, pre-verbal (i.e. around when you were 8 months old) experience it will prove illuminating and healing.

You are near the water, which is a symbol of emotions (tears, the feminine principle and the Great Mother, particularly the sea). In other words you and your family situation are, in the dream, in psychological relationship to your own time of being the baby.

The “pod” could be a symbol of the womb, or of a cocoon-like place where one retreats in order to transform into the next stage of ourselves. At first it is fun, but when the mother goes away (and even a hundred yards is miles to a baby) things get difficult. The “wall” could symbolize conscious and unconscious, thus the baby goes into the out of sight/out of mind place where perhaps you felt that you were as a little baby.

The “left” side could be a sort of pun, that you felt “left” by your mom, or other caregivers, and this injured you terribly, the cut-off arm symbolizes just how bad the injury might have felt (sort of a dazed, “Saving Private Ryan” D-Day/B-Day horror at landing in this life?).

You pick up the baby (your symbolic self) and you pick up the severed left arm (the part of you that was “left” behind) and you hold both parts, in horror, but also in consciousness.

Perhaps you could use your imagination to picture, cartoon-like, re-attaching the baby’s arm, and magically healing and protecting the baby, and promising it that whether or not you felt safe as a child, you are going to take good care of both your real child, but also your imagined child. Too complicated to explain here, but doing this sort of imagination can prove very healing, literally, to the brain, giving you a new sense of safety, playfulness, empowerment and enhancing your ability to trust and connect with others.

Your article came very timely although today is Feb. 5, 2013. I woke disturbed by a long, invoked dream of searching at length for my son, now eight months old, but much younger when I finally found him in the dream. He was probably two months old or less when I heard his cries and finally found him in a toy chest in an open plastic bag with ice (some melted to water) and fire starter fluid. I screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘Who did this? !!!” Over and over again while running frantically back up stairs and through rooms with people from my past just staring back at me shaking their heads. I ended the dream by sitting down in bed to breastfeed and nurture his icy cold fingers and toes… then woke up with him sleeping quite peacefully in my arms. I was terrified, but after reading your words, I realized a part of me was probably very hurt before I could remember when my mom went back to work after six months maternity leave and left me under the care of grandparents. I think the dream led me through an entire gamut of unconscious hurt and pqin layers throughout my life starting with my present fear of feeling vulnerable to being attacked at night and isolated from loved ones through the levels of the house and different people/scenarios associated with my mom and our broken bond all the way back to younger than two months old. I cries after reading your post to relieve old pain and for happy relief my own baby is a miracle who keeps teaching me more about commission every day… and night!

I am so pleased to read your words, to see how you were able to work with the imagery of your dream to better understand your fear and past hurts. By sharing your words you connect with me and with other readers who can relate all to well to these themes, perhaps more able to treasure the blessings of those we love, and of love itself. Maybe we can even think about our fears in some new way: as impetus to awaken to love and to our shared condition in which we all truly want the best for our children (which is also, symbolically, the eternally emerging aspect of our selves, individual and collective).

Hello, I need help with my nightmares. It seems like here recently they have become more frequent but has kept around the same amount of intensity. My dreams are always about my children dying. I am a fearful mother at times (sometimes I am cool with them just doing their own thing outside, except baby) but having dreams about my children dying, particularly my youngest, which is 1, is really stating to get to me. This afternoon I laid down for a nap. I don’t remember anything before looking at a new home and almost talking to a real estate agent (they were busy talking to another client at this home). Next thing I remember is taking a cab to the next town? over, even though we had our own car. We made it there, got dropped of at a Chinese restaurant and being the only customers there. We never made it past the fish tank, which used to be full of fish but now only had one. When we decided to go home,we realized we couldnt afford a taxi back cause it was expensive to get there. We were thinking if we can just get back into town, we can walk from where ever to get to our car. We ended up stealing a car. (I have never stolen a car a day in my life). We drove back into the town we lived in, the nearest place we could stop in the town we lived in was at the beach. We got out, got the carseats out, our stuff etc. Went walking along the beach sidewalk, down the stairs that usually would lead us into the sandy shoreline but this day was different. The water was high, I had my both my little girls hands, my fiancee had my sons hand and was higher on the stairway than me and the girls. A wave came in and swept my baby girl away. I saw her underwater facing up and looking at me as she was taken into the ocean. I just stood there and thought to myself ” She can be anywhere in this water.”, deeply, deeply saddened. Then I woke up and realized that I might have a nightmare issue since this is not my first go around here recently about having a dream about my kids dying. Please help me. I am on well my way to my breaking point about these dreams. They hurt me on the inside alot. I dont want to feel those feelings anymore.
P.S.- No im not suicidal, just am fed up with the way I feel during the dreams. I.E., the saddness, the emotional grief.
Regards, Crystal

While you have a lot of content here, I’ll make a few guesses at some of the central symbols and hope it sparks your own creativity and Self-exploration.

The houses towns could symbolize different feelings you might have or different “selves” or states of mind. You are looking at a new house, suggesting a wish to come to a new feeling; going to another town could be another way of saying the same thing.

You acknowledge painful feelings, so this dream might mostly be about your search for better feelings, symbolized by water (grief, sorrow, tears, the unconscious).

A lone fish in a tank could further the symbol of your feeling all alone in your sadness, like Alice drowning in her own tears in Wonderland.

You steal a car (not something you would actually do) and this could show that you don’t feel that you can get free, or get a new chance by honest means (suggesting perhaps that past hurts feel like they limit your forward progress).

You go to a “beach sidewalk” which could symbolize an ability to walk alongside the great water (ocean, mother, deep or collective unconscious). The “water is high” perhaps meaning feelings are very big and menacing.

Your fiance would symbolize your own masculine aspect, your higher or analytic thinking when you feel overwhelmed by feeling. Being “higher on the stair” could symbolize this higher consciousness or better view of the situation.

Your baby girl would symbolize your own infant Self, the overwhelmed part of you that felt swept out to sea, perhaps by the emotions of your own life when you were 1 or younger. She is “facing up” meaning perhaps that there is some strange optimism hidden in this seeming tragedy (i.e. “things are looking up”).

Perhaps you too are “looking up” the meaning of your dream, paying attention to your thoughts, feelings and the likely sorrows of the past (which feel like they keep repeating).

If the dream is suggesting that you may be depressed (recurring bad dreams, sadness and emotional grief) perhaps seeking some sort of direct therapeutic help would support you to be happier, and that is always good for our children.

Certainly hoping these ideas help, and that you start to have better dreams.

I could really use some help determining why I have been having these terrible dreams. I literally can’t remember the last good, positive dream I had…. I’ve been having these terrible dreams for the past 6 months or so. A lot of times I have nightmares that someone is trying to kill me. I’m being chased, completely terrified in my dreams. Something I have noticed in a lot of those dreams is a door. Not the same door but often it involves me trying to secure a door so that they can’t get in and every time there is something wrong with the door. Either it is very flemsy and they could just push in a part of it and climb in, or I cant get it to shut all the way or the locks are messed up and wont lock, and im always panicking b/c if they get in they will kill me.
The other even more terrifying dreams I have are about my children. I have a 5 month old and an almost 16 month old. Most of them have been about my older child. In a recent dream, He was staying with his Grandmother. I wasn’t sure what had happened to him, but he was rushed to the hospital and when I got there I found out he had died. Of course I broke down and was freaking out. My dream went on to days following his death and I was greiving and just could not accept what had happened and was crying to my family. Everyone was acting like I shouldnt be upset. Like it wasnt a big deal….and I would try to tell them how sad and completely devistated I was…?
Last Night I dreamed that both of my boys were staying at there Grandmothers house (same Grandmother as the one I just told you about) and I went over to her house to pick them up and no one was there…..I was walking through the house looking for them and came to this room with a hot tub in it and my babies were in there drowning. I jumped in and got them both out but my 5 month old kept falling back in. From what I remember they did not die. When she came home I was furious and freaking out…..and thats everything I can remember of that dream.
This is just a couple of the dreams ive had. Like I said before, I have them very frequently. If you could please try to help me understand why I have these nightmares. I hate it, it stresses me out so bad and I wake up exhausted because I feel like ive been through a real tragedy. Please help. Thank you so much!

Given that these nightmares are recurring and that they onset around when you were nine months pregnant with your second child, it raises the question about how your life was when you were just born and in the first year or so.

Perhaps your mom had a difficult pregnancy, or maybe there were stresses or losses in the family coinciding with your birth? This would make sense given the symbols in the dream, and it would make sense that it would all be terribly confusing for you if the trauma your body carries, which was triggered into consciousness by having your own babies, originally occurred at a time before we even have memories in the way we think of memory as grown-ups (around 18 months and older).

The door might symbolize how you felt unable to have a safe boundary when you were little. The door is flimsy and you are not protected. This could mean psychological intrusion not necessarily physical.

The fact that grandmother neglects the children suggests deeply held feelings of abandonment.

The hot tub could be a symbol of the womb, and your wish to rescue yourself from feelings of unwantedness stemming that far back. It would be hard for your mom to acknowledge if you were a wanted pregnancy, but it seems like you might at least feel neglected and unwanted—and to a child that feels like dying.

If you can realize that this is no longer about your mom or grandparents or dad or even about your babies, it is more about how the inner parent or great parent figures are in no real relationship with the inner child. You, and your conscious psyche, fishing the children out of the unconscious waters, is the mom bringing all the parts, dark and light, together into consciousness.

In the first dream your feelings of loss and grief are minimized and denied. It would make sense that your unconscious wants to be understood in your feelings of loss and grief SO that you can heal and move on.

Perhaps deeper insight into your pain, anger, loss and sorry will help transform the dreams, which are like a teacher (when the lesson is grasped, the dreams move on to the next lesson).

If the bad feelings or dreams continue, you might like to look at a book on healing trauma by Peter Levine: http://bit.ly/VhabtM

Hi, I’ve read through all the other posts and I can see how you arrive at your interpretations. I keep having the same type of night mare about son who will be 2 this December. All of them involve water, sometimes he’s running off a cliff in water, sometimes we are in car that crashes into water, sometimes the ground beneath our feet just turns into water. But it’s always water and one of us always dies, sometimes me, sometimes him, but ne’er both of us and both of us never live.

When I was kid growing I always had night terrors and they always in loved water too. My night terrors finally went away right before I left for the army and now they are back ever since I had my son. Is my subconscious reverting back to my childhood terrors because I have a child?

Perhaps we can look at the three major elements here: mother, child, water.

The child comes from the mother just as the mother came from her mother (the Ocean or Water as Great Mother) and thus we have Great Mother as super-mom or source of life.

In your dream you face a dilemma: you cannot live as both a child and a grown-woman at the same time… except IN the water (in the womb you are one with mother; in the deep unconscious we ARE the water and here we contain all life, all possibility). Men tend to be black and white thinkers (hence computers with their zero or one “thinking”); yet we are arriving at a new science where at least sub-atomic particles can be two places at once, or in two states of being at once).

This, in my view, is a “feminine” sort of consciousness. Thus it fascinates me that you are a mom who served in the army (you’re tougher than myself, i imagine—and hat’s off to you). Your nightmares subsided when you were in the army, perhaps because you were part of a big collective group and you didn’t have to deal on an individual level with decisions, trusting in the chain of command. That works for war and for competing, but it doesn’t work for love and for mothering.

You slipped in your typing and wrote “always in loved water,” perhaps revealing that you fear water and also love it. I wonder how life was for you when you were two (did dad leave mom at that time? Did Grandma pass away swamping mom with sadness? did someone in your family literally drown?) Whatever the “facts” might have been, your feeling was best symbolized by water and drowning.

You are struggling to be conscious, thus it might help to imagine yourself on a beach, staring out a the vast ocean while holding your baby-self on you lap. Pretend you can talk to the ocean, maybe saying, “I respect you in your vastness and know that you are the part of me I cannot contain, control or understand. I am thankful to exist and I am thankful to have a baby. But you have been scaring me and killing me all my life and I recognize that you are my most powerful part, something I cannot control, something that wants to share Her power and wisdom with me. I love you, but I am afraid. Can you please tell me what you want me to know that I do not yet recognize, for if you truly wanted me dead I’d already be dead and I’m open to learn and respect you.”

If the ocean will talk back, in your imagination, maybe you will learn a secret about yourself. Maybe you will grow more powerful, safe and this will be a good thing for your baby and for all of us, since we share the world, and the oceans, and we need to treat nature a little better, I suspect—the nature that is not just in the forest or at sea, but that nature you see when you gaze softly enough into the mirror.

At the very least you can honestly say, to the scared child within, that whatever childhood was about, you are tough and loving and a good protector and your inner child will live at least as long as you live—and happily too, if you have anything to say about it.

I do love the water and I’m terrified of it at the same time. My son also loves the water and had no fear, he just runs right in. A lot of what you said was really right on with me, I love structure and discipline and schedules, which is why I loved being in the military and I feel lost with out it. My parents divorced when I was in 6th grade but they fought a lot before the divorce. A lot of what you mentioned made me realize things that I hadn’t connected to this before but it makes sense. Thank you so much! Hopefully this will work it all out.

Hi Bruce ! I had almost the same dream with the very first dream you posted here.
We went to a mall and my husband parked outdoors, my husband was left at the parking lot he was fixing our things. But the 2 maids with us, a yaya and my niece and daughter got off the car with me. it was already dark at that time, my daughter who is 2yrs old seem excited to go inside the mall. She ran away and I ran after her. Chasing her and afraid that she might get caught with other running cars. To my surprise I can’t keep my pace with her, I am running very slow but at my best but really cant keep track with her which is very impossible to happen and I don’t know why. I keep on chasing her telling her to stop but she wouldn’t stop. til the yaya joined me to chase her, the yaya ran passed me but still can’t keep pace with my daughter. When the 3of us were already near the entrance of the mall, (driveway of the entrance) there is an approaching car and I shouted there is a car! then to my surprise my 2 yr old daughter climbed up the railing and jumped and I heard 2 splashes. 2 splashes Because the yaya also jumped. we didn’t know it was a river. Then I woke up, it was 8am this morning and relieved my daughter is safely sleeping but I am really horrified about the dream. What does this mean?

Perhaps your inner child is growing fast within you and your conscious or ego-self is realizing that she cannot keep up (i.e. develop the brilliant child-mind that is one with nature and being) with the natural brilliance of a child not yet taught all the wrong lessons of our current culture (fear, greed, violence, shame).

The two maids would be the attending parts of your own psyche, of lower social status but higher spiritual status. “Yaya” derives from the Yoruba name for great grandmother and divine spirit. Your niece is the part of you that is your sibling’s child, thus also closer to your own child aspect.

Your husband self represents the male aspect, the part in our culture that “fixes” things, a perspective that frames everything as rational, as puzzles to solve and this aspect tries to dominate and subjugate nature and, at worst, other humans.

This is not about your actual husband, the masculine principle is an aspect in women and men alike, but when thinking and fixing gets separated from feeling and connecting we have… the mall. The collective place where the zombie parts of ourselves gather to buy stuff we mostly don’t need and just as often can’t afford.

Thus the child appears to run toward the collective, in danger of being destroyed by the car (symbol of the ego-self and the polluting destructive machine age). The child reaches the barrier and leaps… into the river (river of life, feminine aspect, the place where the yaya and the child, the mother and the child, your own conscious ego-self and your deeper and more authentic Soul Self, all meet in the symbolic source and destiny of us all.

This is a good dream. Trust that your child soul knows exactly what she is doing.

You are being transformed by your dream life just as you are being transformed by parenting, by loving someone more than you love yourself.

Trust this process, have a soft and loving heart toward that person you may glimpse in the mirror when you look compassionately enough. Then take that gaze to the world and the zombies may appear merely hurt children.

Here’s to better dreams through understanding the disturbing ones. Hope it helps.

Hello Bruce, I really want to understand this dream I had. I dreamt that I was living in a two flat next to the ocean and we were on the second floor
. My husband and I were hosting a small gathering of people from both our families. All of a sudden a huge wave starting coming thru the windows and everyone jumps up in disbelief.
Everyone is ok and after the waves die down I exit my apartment thru the back to check on the first floor. I see a few people cleaning up and although I have never met these people I know that they are the owners of this building.they are also ok.
The screen changes immediately to everyone and i at my event are sitting on a wooden deck over the water laughing in disbelief of what just happened when another wave comes crashing into us and the deck breaks apart. We all start floating with the wave and it is the first time in my dream I think about my daughter who is almost 2 years old. Then one of my relatives floating near me shout ” the baby, get the baby”. I look where she is pointing and I see my child floating face down. The wave brings her closer and my relative and I could not reach her. I woke up in panic just to find her sleeping next to me and ok. Please let me know what it’s means thank you!!!!

We could look at this dream at both personal and possibly collective levels.

At the personal level the “two flat” itself might be a symbol of your ego-self with all its varied contents while the ocean might symbolize the larger soul Self out of which the individual self emerges and stands in relationship to it.

Dreams have some element of wish in them, and the gathering of people from both your own and your husband’s families suggests your wish to blend the part of yourself, perhaps parts that do not yet fully get along or function as one unified family (symbol of one unified self as a human being, which in turn can then better relate to the group and to the world, but we all seem to work on this all our lives).

You inhabit the second floor, suggesting you place yourself in higher consciousness, but this might also hint that you are not as down to earth as some in your family, or inner self, think you should be? In any event, the wave comes in the window, and this could be symbolic of the unconscious coming into your own consciousness. But the unconscious is too big for the conscious to contain. “Everyone jumps up in disbelief” could symbolize how parts of you, or your family in waking life, appear not to believe in anything they cannot see or touch (i.e. lack of spirit, or soul, or faith, etc.).

When the wave literally comes in the window, it’s hard to maintain denial that the wave is “real.” Of course it is only “real” in your dream, which hints at the dilemma of taking the inner world seriously without asserting that it is real in the same way as the the waking world. However, if we do ignore the inner world, that of spirit and soul, it does tend to get louder and “wake us up” with its messages.

You go downstairs and see people “you do not know” cleaning up. They “own the building” thus they symbolize the earthier “land lords” who possess the ego but not the soul or ocean. Still, they do the hard work, the stuff connected to earth and foundation and they are the hard-working but unappreciated part of you—again we all can related to working hard while feeling unseen, misunderstood or unappreciated (where the ocean unites us, but threatens to harm us in our individuality we are not alone, but we are a bit at sea).

In order to check on the first floor you go through the “back door” perhaps suggesting you are traveling into the realm of the past to understand better the situation of the present.

You are on a wooden deck over the water, which is like a ship in some sense, a way to navigate the water, but this deck is still attached to land, and thus cannot be on the sea without being ripped apart. Perhaps this symbolizes the pull between earth and water, between mother and father. This makes me wonder if you feel tension with your husband, or felt tension between your mom and dad when you were little, especially when you were nearly two years old yourself?

The wave is like a force that is too big to stop, and this could symbolize your emotions when you were little, and how you somehow felt like you were unseen and emotionally drowned in the context of your childhood situation. Perhaps there was even some literally brush with danger at the sea or in the bath?

The unconscious may be saying that you must notice your own inner child who may appear drowned, but in dream logic she can be revived and your panic and sorrow (your own ocean of tears) can serve to rescue her and discover that the child is a symbol of the eternal child, which never dies but which brings us to our more soulful and more alive Selves.

Finally, at the collective level, perhaps we parents are all feeling a bit overwhelmed by the various oceans (information, debt, violence, fear, loneliness) that we feel like we face alone and ill-equipped, and our collective children drown in the reflecting waters of our own massive narcissism (i.e. our not knowing who we actually are, not individually nor collectively).

Perhaps if we make use of our dreams, and our technology, much as your dream and our shared technology has lead to this little interaction in this little box on a blog in the vast ocean of seemingly random information, we might all slowly find ourselves guided by our fears (harm to our children) and our desires (community, family, harmony, safety, playfulness, freedom without isolation) toward new ways of relating and parenting and even partying.

In closing, I note that your name, Irazu, might be associated with the volcano in Costa Rica. In this sense your mother and father, and the fate they represent, name you and you yourself might be associated, in your own unconscious, with something potentially destructive that sits high up between two oceans. Not to make too much of this, but a volcano can be a way in which land itself emerges out of ocean, offering verdant dwelling and yet potentially threatening those who live near it… echoing the way humans emerge from the ocean, and now threaten to poison the very ocean who is our Mother (with sea water in our very veins).

As we evolve, the poetic and mystical meet and merge with the rational and scientific. Perhaps when this melding gains adequate maturity we will use our rational AND loving potential to take better care of our parents (land and water) and our children (actual kids as well as the spirit, akin to light, that they carry, illuminating our lives and our consciousness with what actually “matters”).

I just had a strange dream and I was looking for an interpretation and I stumbled upon this post. It’s a very similar dream but different at the same time.

It started with me and my friends in a water park. We are having fun and all of a sudden we decide to leave ’cause of cold weather warnings. My dreams just shifted to a different place. Somehow I was at a rocky formation with a lake in the middle. The lake didn’t seem too large, but it was crystal clear, nice blue. My entire family was there. But the people I most vividly remember are my mom, older sis and grandma with my 2 yr old nephew. In that lake we saw giant dolphins, belugas and black whales swimming, or rather having fun. There was a huge crwd to see them . In my dream it seemed like a miracle that so many of these huge bodies would appear in this lake out of nowhere and they are swimming in the direction of the water flow. Surprisingly to me, nobody was trying to hurt them or hunt/fish them either. Everyone was just peacefully watching them swim.

Then all of a sudden my nephew asked if he could get something for my sis. It seemed very cute. It’s almost as if he said, “mamma, can I get (happiness) for you?” I don’t really remember if he said happiness…this is the only word I don’t quite rememeber. But I do rememeber that we thought that it was cute that a 2 yr old would ask to get this for his mom. my sis just smiled and said yes. Then he started running. To everyone it seemed he’s just running around like small kids do, but I got an intuition that he’s gonna jump from that rocky cliff and I ran after him and he jumped.

I don’t know what happened after that but the next scene immediately was a huge group of penguins walking in front of me. And then I woke up.

I don’t know what this means, but I was left quite disturbed because this was the first time I had a dream about my nephew and he jumped off a cliff :(

P.S: Last night I had a dream that a tiny black fish dived inside my stomach and is swimming in my blood in my body. Somehow I got it out but it dived in again. I seemed to be very scared in my dream about this.

It’s been two nights in a row I have been having fish dreams. What do you think it might symbolize?

Thanks for sharing this dream. A couple of ideas to consider might be that “cold weather warnings” suggest the psyche is about to deal with the issue of isolation or lack of comfort. Next the body of water is a collective image of the unconscious with these evolved aspects safe and in harmony with the environment. I might think of your sister as your “sad self” and your nephew as your “child self” who seeks to bring happiness to your sad self. The child is natural and without falseness, and thus relates thematically to the natural creatures in the water; water can also represent the feeling aspect of the psyche. The child leads you “off the cliff” of the rational thinking self and toward the water (i.e. into feelings and exploration of the unconscious).

Next appear penguins in a big group. Penguins are both black and white, so they might represent the melding of your thinking and feeling selves; they are also comfortable on land and in the water, representing your versatile aspect; they are also good parents who work together to keep their babies warm.

As for the black fish, this dream could be saying that the dark aspect of the self is not a fish out of water, but is at home in your gut (or intuition) and in your blood. They say we once lived in the ocean, and our blood is like sea water. These dreams seem to be inviting you to confront your fears, perhaps feelings of abandonment, coldness, hurt in the past and to trust that there may be forces in the psyche ready to help you.

In some fairy tales a magic fish is released and grants wishes. Fish also live in schools, a possible hint that it is time for some new learning. A nice thing to do might be engaging the fish, and the dolphins, whales, penguins, etc. in a fantasied conversation where perhaps they have lessons to teach.

And also note that a more recent post ( http://tiny.cc/wh6qc ) was inviting dreams to be shared, so perhaps it is synchronicity that you came across this older post when you did.

Finally, please do not take anything I venture as definitive. My main encouragement is to assist you, and other readers, in engaging our inner worlds in a creative manner—toward the greater penguin and whale and fish wisdom that sees us humans as part of, and not observers of, nature.

Bruce
I have been having some very bad dreams about my 2 year old son getting hurt. The most recent dream i had was so horrific i woke up crying. We were house sitting and their steps were open and for whatever reason we were on them when my son slipped through the crack. I clearly remember holding on to him awkwardly screaming for my husband who just continued to sleep soundly. I was unable to pull my son up and he fell but underneath the steps wasnt just your average carpet/floor, it led to the garbage disposle 30ft down :( I was scurrying down to the little open door to crawl in and see if I could find him. Fortunetly when I opened the door he was there crying. He had a broken arm and was acting limp and just out of it. I called 911 and couldn’t get them there quick enough so my dream turned to me trying to get him to the hosp on my on. Once we were in the hosp things started to go wrong medically and I was intervening. For ex: he had on concentrated oxygen and was trached. Well, I had woke up in my dream to him choking from water gettting through his nasal canula. I ripped out his oxygen and saved him from aspirating. Then at this point I actually woke up in real life time running into his room to find him sound asleeo. Why am I having such horrific dreams about my baby getting hurt? Thanks in advance!

I’m sorry that you’ve been waking up crying, but I suspect these dreams are more about your own past and your own traumas than about your actual child now. The good news is that resolving your own trauma helps you make your child secure so that the trauma does not get carried forward in the family.

Your dream is both graphic and also poetic. After all, how many children seem to “fall through the cracks” in our culture that fails children and parents so often with regard to health services, education and compassion.

But just as a nightmare literally costs nothing, the mind just makes it up; perhaps our ability to care about each other as human beings does not come from government. We are the people, after all, we’re just a bit scared, traumatized and lacking in conscious awareness; when we feel safe and loved, we are generous and compassionate. Men change the world one war and empire after another, going around in a big circle; mothers change the world one child at a time, taking that big circle in an upward spiral of consciousness toward the angels, the Buddhas, the Christs, etc… whatever can bring the love, that’s what we need.

So… you’re a mom, and you know you love your child more than anything (same as every mother through human history); and you feel a bit powerless against the current situation: badly constructed steps in a house that is not really your own.

The steps could symbolize development—individual and collective/societal. The “house” you are “sitting” is a symbol of self (something that contains multiple rooms, ideas, states of mind). “Sitting” is passive, but also meditative; it is time to contemplate this “other” house. That house is the house of bad ideas, but it is not men, governments, fathers, perpetrators and other traitors (but rather our own Shadow, that which is “lower” or less conscious in us… our reptilian brains, (see:http://privilegeofparenting.com/2011/01/19/the-lizard-brain-is-a-lonely-hunter/
)

The Shadow holds our power, and we must deal with it consciously, in the light of waking thought. Your 2-year-old self may be a symbol of a time when you got hurt, when you fell through the cracks (of a disintegrating family situation, of economic struggle, of difficult moves, or losses in the family?)

The “garbage disposal” is an apt symbol of utter annihilation, that dread of being unwanted like garbage and pulverized into sewage and swept out to sea of non-existence. It is the core of our human, and universal, existential dread. It can undo us, but our shared dread of it can bond us together. First in primitive superstition, then in religion, and later in a more enlightened and rational society.

Pain is a teacher, and threat to our children is a very powerful teacher indeed.

Still, in dream-life, your child is your child-self, thus the broken arm could represent your own past helplessness to fight back or even contribute to the family situation (arm not working/capacity impaired).

Acting “limp and out of it” suggests a dissociation response. This is where the child goes after fight-flight is overwhelmed by threat combined with helplessness. They look like they are “calm” but they have left their bodies, psychologically. Thus perhaps this dream is a sort of “soul retrieval” for you, a coming back into your body where it was when the soul left the body of your building and sent you “house sitting” a sort of ghostly persona somewhere that was anywhere but in your actual self, for she was in too much pain to deal.

The metaphor of having to get your child-self to the hospital on your own only furthers the message, as your call for help is not heard (“911 is a joke,” to reference Public Enemy, and it’s true, at least in your nightmare).

Your mother self knows her way around a hospital, and that’s a good thing for your child self. “Concentrated oxygen” could be a pun about mental acuity, your ability to concentrate what is needed, and pull the trache… which could symbolically be like a knife in the throat, choking your child self and preventing him/her from having a voice.

Finally, a child who is getting oxygen, but not on their own, could symbolize a fetus connected by tube to the mother… the “bad mother” as nightmare hospital; and themes about garbage disposals, broken arms, cracks (“crack” the drug) could also symbolize urban oppression, and themes of pregnancies that may not be born of love… leaving kids feeling like garbage, unwanted, like they were psychologically aborted.

While this may not be true for your waking reality, having worked with group home kids and other children in “the system,” I can attest that it is true for too many of our children. In this way sometimes dreams are about a bigger situation and not just ourselves.

If you had a tough childhood, I encourage you to seek help to heal any lingering trauma. If you had a good childhood, perhaps you are so solid you are dreaming about the collective situation and the needs of other moms and kids who fall through the cracks that form when we are divided from each other as parents caring together for all our collective children.

I do think your real baby is okay, and I do think “concentrating” on these dreams and their potential meaning will help you no longer have the nightmares.

If the dreams don’t go away, write again and we’ll try another interpretation.

And send good wishes to all the children who feel like the child does in your nightmare. Sometimes our identification with the child must die in order for our fuller selves as parents, grown-ups, fellow humans to be born.

Hello, I for the first time had a bad dream about my 3 yr old son. We were at a waterpark then out of no where I fell somehow in to this rushing river taken me away from my son. But it was all going on at a water park still. My son did not go into the watter but I tried to swim against these rapids to get to the shore-like place he ewas left behind I was frantic and then found a way to get out of the river then searched for the spot were I left him and I had to continue going through obstacles and that seemes to always take me further from him before I could find him I awake and started crying.. my son is my everything. I’m a single mom and hate when he’s away for long periods like visiting his dad for weeks or months. I don’t quite get this dream. I have been searching all morning…help….

Perhaps the water is the flow of your deeper self and the baby is the baby you once were (perhaps there was separation or loss when you were 3?).

Imagine that you are the river. You let go, you flow with it to the ocean where all the rivers meet and none are refused. You evaporate and become a cloud. You drift to the mountain, the higher part of your consciousness where all the rivers begin. You fall gently like a snow-flake and then melt into a droplet and flow calmly and then swiftly to arrive again at your baby self where you gently help him/her emerge from the unconscious and into the lovely possibility of today.

Obstacles are like rocks in the river of life. They do not stop the river, but the river takes care of them over time, the way water always prevails over rock.

The more your inner mom holds your inner-baby calmly and confidently, letting the river of tears be cried by you so your baby does not drown in his/her own tears, the more able you will be to tolerate the separation periods.

BTW you also have an inner dad figure who can hang out with you and your inner baby in the healing times when your actual baby is away. Then your baby returns to a mother who is more happy and safe (not turbulent or too watery) and benefits from your ability to be a bit of a rock yourself in the river of your child’s own journey of development.

By being a bit playful, we can inhabit all the parts (baby/mother; water/obstacles) and combine solid mature parenting with playful and liberating imagining.

All Best Wishes

p.s. see Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” for a lot of deep thoughts on the watery part of the world. He writes, “Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

Personally I think the only meanings of these dreams reflect the love you have for your children and the extent you will go to to protect them. I’m forever having these dreams and now I realise why. I love my son unconditionally and my worst fear would be (as all parents) to lose him. I’m forever being told by my brothers I’m over protective, my lad is 3 and I won’t allow him to walk by rivers in aided or climb climbing frames unless I’m beneath to catch him if he falls, surly it would be neglect if I didn’t and he fell from such a height etc etc. So last night I dreamt my brother was out walking with my son and the approached a stream with boulders on the side, he allowed my son to climb over these boulders unaided and I could see this at a distance then I seen my son trip and fall from a height into the river below. I remember my brother jumping in but I also remember myself jumping too and breaking both legs in the fall. This happened at a place I grew up also where I used to play with my friends. Next thing I remember is seeing my brother holding up my son who was opened eyes and ridged but breathing (paralysed). This was 5.30am I awoke in a sweat and crying and seeing my baby laying peacefully besides me I was relieved. However, I could go back to sleep as I was so disturbed by what potentially could have been real life. I think my dreams just tell me I’m doing a good job looking out for my sons safety always as neglect is where accidents can’t be prevented. So if you have nightmares about your children having accidents or dying, it just shows how much you love them as many dreams are about your worst fears. Well done for loving your children unconditionally as they’re life’s little gifts and treasures. A pity not all parents have this bond xxx

I certainly agree that these nightmares are related to the fact that we love our children so much that losing them or seeing them seriously hurt is truly the worst thing we can imagine as parents.

While it is essential to keep our children safe, it is also interesting to consider multiple possibilities in interpreting dreams, including that dreams about our children may be symbolic dreams about the children we once were ourselves, and how safe that “inner child” does or doesn’t feel right now.

In your dream it could be that you feel criticized by your brother saying you are over-protective, and so in your dream you prove that you are not (only the “brother” who jumps in could be symbolically be that part of yourself that is bold enough to give space for your kid to explore, but which is reckless and unable to protect the child.

Just as Hamlet struggles with opposing feelings and thoughts, perhaps this dream show the mother with broken legs, the child paralyzed and the brother unable to protect.

If there happened to be trauma, losses or injuries within your family when you were a child, or even in your own parents’ childhoods, then this dream might also make sense as we try and deal with the river of ongoing life across generations and different points of view.

Ultimately I agree that you treasure your child and the main point of the dream is that love. Still, as I get ready to launch my oldest child off to college, I can still remember that vulnerable little three-year-old and how scary it can be just trying to keep them safe. As parents we have to continually sort out our own fears, anxieties and past wounds (and be consciously aware of them) SO that we can keep our kids safe and do what’s best for them.

Somehow we want to keep our kids safe while at the same time teaching them to have confidence in themselves and also confidence that they can make good decisions and stay safe in the world. There will be plenty of time for this as children develop, and you have to trust your instincts above all else, adjusting as your child grows.

Thanks so much for stopping by Privilege of Parenting. All Good Wishes and, hopefully, Sweet Dreams (and waking life too)

Hi Bruce. Thank you for your interesting insights on one’s dreams. I had a very disturbing dream last night (I hope its because I’m coming down with flu and that the dream was due to fever….. :-()

I was told by dr’s that I would never be able to have kids. So in my middle 30′s I fell pregnant and it was twins,however,we lost the one at 16 weeks. So yes, I am very protected over my 3 year old.

I dreamt me and him was at a very popular swimming resort. I was having coffee with the manager in his office when I “remembered” about my kid (something that is defnitely not likely to happen). I ran to the swimming pool that was full of swimmers and I asked them if they saw him. All said no,as I was about to turn arround to look for him I saw his lifeless body (he had a red t-shirt and a red short on) on the bottom of the pool.

I know these dreams can be so haunting and horrifying, yet we might think about it in terms of your own thoughts and feelings and not about danger for your child.

Given that you lost one of the twins in your pregnancy, perhaps you are still trying to come to terms with that loss, which metaphorically becomes expressed as a drowning (i.e. to die in the womb is to die in water).

Swimming and water can be symbolic of the unconscious, thus a “popular swimming resort,” might be a symbol for a collective “pool” of our unconscious—just as talking together here on this blog is a collective pool of thinking, and your dream joins several other dreams as we all try and understand our fears, accept life and loss and strive to love and be kind to each other—perhaps even to the spirits of those who have died.

The “manager” of the swimming resort might symbolize the part of yourself who is in charge, who “manages” the feelings and thoughts of ALL the swimmers. You were having coffee with your manager self, and coffee might symbolize waking up, or becoming more conscious or aware (of feelings, losses, of the different parts of your self).

Seemingly as an effect of coffee with the manager you “remember” or come back into consciousness of your child (this might be the child you lost, but also the child that you once were when you were three—perhaps a time of pain of “drowning” in difficult feelings?).

You ask the other swimmers if they saw your child, and they had not—symbolizing how your child self, and your pain (and particularly the pain of losing a child before term, which is generally not truly recognized in our culture as the tragedy that it is) has not been seen by the group.

You have to think about what red might symbolize, but certainly anger, passion and love are possibilities as for the meaning of the red t-shirt and short.

You jump into the water (i.e. you accept the unconscious and the need to go there into your deep and sad feelings… which allows you to “wake up” and realize that your actual child that did survive is okay, but that you need to fully grieve the loss of your child who died at 16 weeks.

Thus I wish you condolences and compassion, and invite other readers who come across these words to join me in sending love to you for your loss, and to the spirit of the child you did lose.

While the past contains terrible sadness, this dream is not a harbinger of the future so much as an opportunity to come to terms with the past and into greater life and joy in the present moment.

hello my name is christina and for the past week Ive been having the same nightmare every night. my 3 year old son, husband and father are standing around a deep well they just dug. as i walk up to them i can hear my son ask to play in the water and my husband states “sure go ahead” as my son jumps into the well and i see him sink deeper and deeper out of sight, im the only one frantic trying to get him back everyone else is just standing there watching him sink further and further like nothing is happening. i fall to my knees and try to grab him then suddenly he begins to float slowly to the top so i grab him out of the water and hold him tightly to my chest all i can feel the ice cold water dripping off his red pajamas i cant tell weather or not he is ok. i wake up heart pounding and have to go check on him or i cant fall back to sleep. i am very nervous about this my father has a summer home and just had a well dug yesterday i want to keep him away from the summer home but i know that its being overly protective

Yes this is very scary, but I think the meaning is not as dire as you might think. Obviously you would want to supervise any 3 year-old closely around pools, wells, lakes, roads and other sorts of potential danger. That said, the psychological meaning of this dream could be something about the “male” aspect of your own self.

We have son, husband and father represented—the male part of yourself that you love, but do not recognize as also a symbolic aspect of your own self, in this case across three generations, but also across the life-cycle from baby to man to grandfather (wisdom figure).

Your dad has a summer house in real life—and the house is also a symbol of a larger sort of self, that which holds all the parts of our psychological self (dreams of hotels, apartment buildings, etc. can have similar symbolic potential).

The summer house (a place for fun) has a deep well—a symbol of the unconscious and also of the Mother/feminine principle. The well (or also the well-spring) are symbols of birth and this could be the birth of a new you, or a new level of consciousness.

Just as your child emerged from your own body, as a symbol of the child who must die in order for the grown-up to be born your child goes into the well, but floats back up (i.e. comes back up into consciousness from the depths of the unconscoius).

On the sad side, you may have felt suffocated, controlled or frustrated when you were 3; certainly three-year-olds can be very challenging, running away to explore and possibly scaring us parents, but also they are growing new powers and thus symbolize the first stages of becoming one’s own little self as a little bit independent person.

On the plus side, you are confronting that something in you can go deep and come back from this. The dream doesn’t mention your mother, but perhaps the well is a symbol of how the mother sits in your own psychology (perhaps a missing of the mother, or a wish that she were able to help contain, renew or transform your own child self).

Now that you ARE a mother, you may be ready to realize that you are a child, but also the parent; that you can contain and renew your most sacred, happy, free and authentic self through going deep within your own true heart and mind.

I’m sure you love your men, but often women struggle to come into full possession of their full grace and power, perhaps preferring a bit to stay as girls (especially if the men want innocence more that wisdom, sweetness more than power in their women).

Finally, the ice cold water might be a symbol of coldness, for example if you felt your mom wasn’t a big hugger or touchy-feely sort. Then the need to hug the cold and scared kid comes up in the dream—but if you imagine holding, warming and protecting your own little kid self you may find that the bad dreams go away and in fact you might feel a greater feeling of joy, play and security and you learn once again to see the world with the wonder of a child tempered by the maturity and wisdom of a parent.

I just had a dream last night that disturbed me. It was very real and vivid, and I remember it clearly (and I rarely ever remember my dreams). I dreamt the my 9 year old son, and myself were in a big truck I was driving and the truck somehow ended up sinking in a body of water. We couldn’t get out and darkness came quick my youngest went out of sight first then my 9 year old but before he disappeared completely he grabbed my hand and then I was succumbed to darkness. At this point I didn’t try and fight I just allowed it to swallow me and then I had this huge grasping for air. Now at this point I kind of thought I was dreaming and felt myself really grasping for air where my son sleeping next to me would have felt me grasping and would have woken him up but when I woke he was sound asleep unaffected. I was confused and disturbed by the dream but I went right back to sleep dreaming right away but don’t remember what about. Any interpretations….really felt it was significant but not sure what it could mean…

Firstly, dreams about drowning and water seem to be the most common theme when I tally all these nightmares we have about our children. The second most common theme is falling or flying.

It seems that our brains naturally generate a sensation of sinking and another of floating, and some people suggest that this is where our myths of heaven above and hell below originate.

But our brains also naturally try to make meaning of our experiences, and so we create stories of drowning and flying. One possible idea about your nightmare could be that when you were three, or nine, you might have had some painful experience (parents’ divorce, a move to a new school, loss of a grandparent, etc.) that gave you a sinking feeling of sadness, or an overwhelming feeling like emotional drowning. Of course if you ever had a scary experience with water, in the tub, pool, lake, etc. that could certainly inform your fears.

In this sense anxiety is often a memory of something scary that we then project into the future and fear that it might happen; this is a way of trying to deny that it already happened.

In your dream you allow the darkness to swallow you up, and this might be a signal that whatever pain you have of the past, your mommy self who you are now has a grip on your child selves (symbolized in the dream by your children) and then you wake up, which could mean that you are coming into a more conscious relationship with your own sorrow.

Finally, water could symbolize the mother, and in this perspective you may have felt your mother to have been depressed or somehow suffocating; if this rang true you would be trying to protect your kids from the depression inside—and one way to do this is to be conscious about your feelings. You wake up and see your kids are fine—and that is not symbolic, but your lived reality, and that is a very good thing.

Hi I koiw thatmny reply is later than most others, but I am glad I found the forum in hopes of a reply. Last night I had a dream that I was talking with my sister on a street corner with town houses lining the streets and a lampost nest to us. I knew my 5 yr old son was close by and thought he was safe. All of a sudden I see him in the drivers seat of a close by childcare van that we see alot around our neighborhood, he was driving the van past where we were talking and he was headed downhill toward a busy intersection…and a few blocks further down hill was a large deep stream of water where I was afraid he would end up crashing! My sister and i started running after him until the intersection…i saw him make it through it but could not run throught it myself…I called on my cell phone 911 to try and phone for help while my sister made it past the intersecttion…I felt helpless, confused, and like time was against me, finally when I made it past the intersection I ran toward the water at the bottom of the hill (which were now lined with businesses) I knew he probably went to the water…looking side to side for him while I mad my way to the water, my sister turned right looking for him elswhere. When I got to the railing that lined the water I started crying with great anxiety and a sense of loss…Where is he I cried…I noticed the current of the water was strong so followed it downstream and saw a tire sticking up ..I jumped in the water and swam to it…It was the van. I swam under a it a bit and rolled it up so I could see the drivers seat where my son was at. He was not submerged in water as I thought he would be, but only up to his waist, and he was turned around in the seat and sleeping, his peaceful face against the back of the seat. I pulled him out, and started swimming to safety with him….then the scene changed to me dripping wet sitting on a closed lid bathroom toilet( a personal bathroom not a public one) holding my wet son who seemed to be sleeping…I knew in my heart he was o.k.and felt grateful that he was o.k…… but disturbed that he wasnt waking up. I kissed his face and tried to dry his hair…then woke up. I am still disturbed…why didnt he wake up? was he dead and o.k. cause he was in heaven…or was he really o.k but just sleeping? All is well now…but I am debating weather to keep my plans to go to the pool today with him.

Firstly, I am sorry for such a scary dream, but besides keeping a close eye on your child as any parent would, and not letting him drive until he has a license :), we can turn to exploring the possible meaning for yourself.

One possibility is seeing the dream as a reflection of different parts of your own self, perhaps even offering wisdom to the rest of us too. In this context your “sister” is your similar, but different, self who watches helpless as this all unfolds (i.e. the passive part of you who must become integrated into your full self via increased consciousness). You are both near a lamppost (a small bit of light, or consciousness, but not enough for the whole picture). You are “near a corner” (about to turn to a new way of seeing things) and there are townhouses, which are separate, but share walls (together AND apart).

A Van is a collective vehicle, not as big as a train or big truck, but bigger than a car, thus suggesting a need to get somewhere with more of yourself. The problem is that your child-self is driving. This could mean that you are not taking good, firm and loving care of your own self, not your kid necessarily. Perhaps in some way your less mature, or conscious, or responsible self feels like it is at the wheel of your life, but not able to control or guide where it is going.

It all goes to the water, which is perhaps a symbol of emotions, tears, the river of life, the great place of crossings (including growing all the way up). Of course rivers can mean renewal and also death, but symbolically as well as literally.

Thus your child self draws you, in your love as a mom, into the water to powerfully set things right (turn over a van, at first all you can see is the tire, perhaps you’re “tired,” as parenting and life can be exhausting).

The sleeping child is the part of you who needs to be loved and allowed to awaken gently… by the loving, brave, protective and increasingly conscious mother aspect of yourself.

Trust your dreams, nature, love and family. We all need to wake up, but in our own good time, and gently, and maybe in the arms of the great Mother that is Divine, or Nature, or God depending on your lexicon. And when we are awake and grown up, then we work together to keep our kids safe, and take good care of whatever portion we are blessed/tasked to look after.

Hope this gives you some ideas to work with. All Good Wishes

^ * * * ^

5 YR OLD RUNS OVER THE HILL AND INTO THE POND

The first dream I had, we were at a park that had a pond (a park I had never seen before), and she was running ahead of me, I was yelling for her to come back, but she kept running. She ran up over a hill, I could not see her, finally I came up over the hill and she was floating face down in the pond. I jumped in the pond, grabbed her and started CPR, I was screaming out. It was horrible. Then I woke up.

I had a really disturbing dream a few months back about my 5 year old son. It started out at an indoor pool it was my boyfriend (who is not my sons biological father), my son and I. There were also other people at the pool that we did not know. There was a young boy there who I did not recognize, maybe a few years older than my son. Me my boyfriend and son are all playing and having fun in the water. We turn around and notice the young boy has pushed a man in the pool and drowned him. For some reason nobody seems surprised and we all carry on in the water. As we are getting ready to leave my son runs off following the boy outside Immediately I take off running after my son outside and I am then standing at the lake where I used to go every summer as a child. It is packed with people and boats in the water and I am searching for my son in the crowd. I feel panicked screaming my sons name as I head towards the water. I am literally running through the water searching for him and other people start helping me look for him. I then feel a hand on my shoulder and think they have found him, thank god! But when I turn around I see the womans expression and look down and there is my sons lifeless body lying in the sand. I feel my heart stop and I cant breath for a minute and then I scream out I am so sorry I failed as a mother and how could I let this happen to my baby! I am so sorry god please forgive me!. I then woke up screaming and crying. My son was staying with my parents for the weekend so I called them to make sure he was alright and sure enough he was fine.In the dream I did not see my son drowned but had a strong feeling that he did and it was the boys fault who he had followed outside.If you can please give me some insight on what this may mean it would be greatly appreciated! also I went back to work in july after being a stay at home mom for two years and have been feeling a large amount of guilt for not being with my son as often as I used to and am not sure if this could have something to do with the dream.

While I cannot hope to be sure what your dream means, we can generate some ideas and hope some make sense to you (and help you have better dreams ahead).

And “indoor pool” could symbolize your personal unconscious—the watery part that is “inside” (i.e. of you). In this space you view your current “family” of son, self and boyfriend.

The “boy you do not recognize” could be you own male aspect and/or child aspect, perhaps it is also the boy within your “boyfriend” who either you, or your child, are not yet fully comfortable with as a “father figure.”

The “man” who is pushed into the pool by the boy would be some sort of inner figure who you either feel has died (your own ex, your father, the image of a “man” who disappointed you?). It is also maybe just “the man,” as in a symbol of oppression. The key here is not to blame but to consider all the figures as parts of Self.

Often we might consider the symbolism of the boy having to die so the man can be born, but here we see the boy killing the man, suggesting a desire not to grow up, perhaps a way of remembering how you yourself felt when you were five, perhaps some feelings you have about your baby becoming a bigger and bigger “little boy.”

In this sense perhaps the older boy represents the non-innocent troublemaker you fear your baby will become as he grows, or perhaps the firebrand you might have been as a “tomboy”? Or perhaps your secret desire to have been more tough and boy-like, particularly if you were hurt in any way as result of being a girl and not a boy?

The venue changes from inside pool to outside lake, and clearly relates back to childhood. The “woman” who brings you the terrible news might be the part of you who sees difficult things (particularly your own past hurts?) and then comes the horrible moment—seeing your child-self dead, presumably drowned, presumably at the hands of the “bad boy.”

Besides supervising your child around water and keeping him safe, which presumably is already an obvious parenting must for you, this dream suggests the confrontation of a feeling of horror, death and tragic loss, but not as a predictor of the future so much as a review of the past. It is when we confront and heal the past that we are free to truly live more fully and joyously in the present.

Yet connecting in dread, tears and lonely feelings of tragic loss sometimes bring the touch of compassionate company that helps facilitate healing. Of course your childhood may have been pure magic and no misery and sometimes a dream is just a dream and nothing more, yet this dream haunted you and so we want to find a loving way to put it properly to bed.

The fact that you had this dream when you son was with your parents would be consistent with some sort of feeling that you yourself didn’t feel entirely emotionally safe when you were little. Your guilt about going back to work could also be a projection onto your child about feeling “left to drown” by mother, when in fact such a long time with him has been fantastic and you’re probably both ready for new steps toward growth and autonomy (work for you, school for him).

Finally, you could imagine going back into the dream and using the power of love and imagination to recognize the “bad kid” as the hurt part of you and the drowned boy as the overwhelmed and “dead” part of you. In dream logic, like cartoon logic, things can reverse and magic can happen. See if you can’t create a better version of this, perhaps seeing the son and the girl you once were, the “bad boy” understood and forgiven and all the parts melding into a you who can love her actual son and actual boyfriend freer of guilt and sorrow.

Please feel free to let me know if this makes any sense or sparks other ideas, and if your dream life gets happier.

Please Help!!! This dream is going to be on my mind for a while. So it begin I was at work ( I work at a daycare and my 6 year old son also attends summer camp there) so we are on a field trip to a place which look like a lake ocean, so my son asked me can he go swim and I told him yes( in real life I would never do that ) So a big ship was coming but my son was still in the water, the ship hit him, so I went in the water after him, when I was saving him he was telling to hurry and get him out of water because he was hurt. So when I got him out of the water he became unconscious. The ambulance was outside waiting for us, so they took him in, but I ended up in a
apartment look for something, when I came downstairs the ambulance was gone, so I got in my car and went to the hospital, however I didn’t end up at the hospital, I ended
up at one of my cousin house, when I was there my mom called and said she was at the hospital with him and he was going into surgery, and was laying down resting
now. I really don’t understand why I didn’t run to be with my baby.

Some ideas to consider as you contemplate this dream might include the symbolism of water as the unconscious part of yourself. In this sense it is not your actual child, but your child as symbol of your own six year old self who you let swim in the “lake ocean.”

A lake is fresh water and ocean salt, perhaps talking about your mixed feelings between sustenance and tears, between Great Mother/Ocean and the purity of a lake/a child of nature?

So… your child goes into the water (return to the womb/mother and also growth and autonomy/trusting him to swim) perhaps meaning your kid self goes into the unconscious so that you can… bring it up into consciousness.

Yet, a “big ship” comes along. This might symbolize the ego, that which goes where it chooses, can handle the big waters of the unconscious by staying at the surface. Yet the ego self “hits” the child self. Herein lies the conflict within your psyche (or maybe I’m off on this, just wanting to encourage you to think deeply and creatively about your own dream): you want to be a great mom, but you also want to be true to yourself, your grown-up needs, etc. and these two parts of you seem to be at cross-purposes.

You go into the water/the unconscious to rescue your child who urges you to hurry (i.e. to get this pain out of the unconscious and into consciousness… which is precisely what the dream is serving to achieve).

Out of the water/unconscious state the child himself now becomes unconscious… in other words the child part of you is only conscious within the unconscious, but is a sort of fish out of water and lapses out of consciousness when out of the unconscious (hence the problem)

The emergency worker part of you/ambulance takes the child to the hospital, a place of healing, but also often a place of origin, of birth. He goes back where he came from and your unconscious puts you in an apartment.

Parenting is exhausting and you work with young children on top of that. Consciously you are an ever-giving caregiver, and so your secret wish/need for a break is expressed in the dream. Perhaps you fear that taking time for yourself or gratifying your own needs (for rest, solitude, self-expression, etc.) would harm your child, and so you do not allow it… leaving the unconscious wish for some alone time to be expressed in the only way you can imagine… by circumstances beyond any personal control.

In the apartment you are “looking for something” (perhaps this has to do with your own self and what you need aside from being a parent). Think about what your cousin might signify for you, but certainly once you are there your mom calls. This, symbolically, would be your inner mother—underscoring the feeling that you need the mother part of you to go to the hospital and deal with the child part of you (perhaps hinting that you may not have felt like your mom was fully there for you in the way you needed when you were six?).

My hope is that in becoming more conscious about your mixed feelings about trying to give you your own child the level of care you yourself may not have felt like you got, you will not need any more disturbing dreams of this nature.

My guess is that you are a very giving mom, but that you are over giving and need to take more compassionate care of your own child self. This may be easier said than done. They say it takes a village, I hope the village coalesces around you :)

Hi, I had a dream last night about my husband, my 7 year old soon, my 5 year old soon, and myself being on a huge boat just looking around and all the sudden there was a huge drop and we were going really fast down it and I was screaming to my husband to grab my 5 year old but its like we were all stuck and couldn’t move and the 5 year old flew out of the side of the boat and I keep thinking I need to go get him but I couldn’t then we got of the boat and it seemed no one was worried but me I then woke up and ran in his room and he was sleeping like a baby. I was scared to go back to sleep because I didn’t want to return to that dream.. What do you think it means?

I wonder if you find your 5 year-old a little more challenging than the older son? Perhaps he reminds you of someone you have had conflicts with—mother or father or sibling?

I ask because sometimes when we have some unconscious anger (normal and natural as it might be) it can find expression in a dream where something “bad” happens to the person who has hurt or frustrated us.

Another thing to consider is what your own life was like when you were five; particularly if you felt somehow left out of the family, or if there were separations or losses in the family when you were that age. This would make particular sense if you happen to be a younger sibling.

Yet another possibility is that the boat is a symbol of either/both your full Self or the family as a whole. “Going down fast” would make sense if there has been recent trouble for the family (i.e. economic difficulties).

The water itself, the ocean, could symbolize the mother or perhaps the collective unconscious. The sense that you are moving deeper into the unconscious would fit with the notion that you are trying to work out some sort of pain from the past, uncertainties or feelings of loneliness or being left out or left behind when you were little—perhaps a time when you felt like “no one was worried but me.”

Maybe you can “return to the dream” in your active imagination, striving to dialogue with everyone and everything in your dream as aspects of yourself, searching for your “lost self” in the ocean of your Great Mother Self.

Symbolically, sometimes the child self (or our identification with the child self) has to perish and disappear in order for us to become fully grown-up.

Obviously you adore your children and your family. Now that you are in a safe and loving family you are safe enough to heal whatever pain harks back to early childhood or other losses along the way. By contemplating many possibilities (and I hope my ideas spark ideas of your own that I might not be able to come up with) you become more conscious, and being more aware and compassionate about your own self and feelings can help free you of bad dreams and melancholy too.

Last night I dreamed my 7 year old daughter and my 7 year old sister got me up for school at four in the morning. I hadn’t slept good that night my chest had been hurtin and there were men working on the water because some pipes have busted. One of the men wanted to know if a worker had step on a fitting of the pipe so I asked my step mom who was also in the house. So the day past quicker and we were all at once on a deck but the deck was on the ground. Most of my family was there 3 of my children were my dad step mom grandma pawpaw husband and few people I haven’t a clue who they were. I’m guessing my 7 year old and sister were still at school and at the time I’m holdin my two youngest daughters. Some boy runs and jumps on this deck and it dents it and after he sees it he does it again and again leaving a hole the boy falls in the hole my 3 year old runs to the hole I yell at him tellin him he better not if the fall don’t kill him I will just jokin of course. But he don’t listen and my son jumps in and the hole grew bigger and water appeared I yell at my husband to get him John get him. My husband jumps in the water but it’s got no bottom to it and they both keep goin under. I than try to hand my child that I’m holding which now I’m only holding one and it’s a boy?? To every body around but they won’t take they baby they tell me it’s too late nothing can be done. So I go to the next perso than the next nobody will take the baby I’m holding I can’t save my 3 year old nor my husband. Than the whole deck starts to fall apart I try to get to the ground to save my baby and my self but there’s no longer a ground I look around and I see every one has made it every one is ok but my 3 year old and my husband and all at once my two baby girls are in my arms again. Than I wake up. My sons in his bed sleepin away all my babies are fine I wake my husband up. This is the very first time I’ve ever dreamed bout my 3 year old before. I use to have bad dreams bout my 7 year old when she was a baby but I figured it was because she was my first child and I worried so much about her. Never my son and husband which is arranged because he is daddy’s boy they are so close. Please help me tell me what my dreams mean or if there is a book or something real cheap I can buy that will help me figure it out thanks worrying momma n wife

While dreams can have many meanings, and I would not want to suggest that I would “know” the meaning of this dream, I could offer some ideas.

Firstly, at the level of the personal/individual I would think about your own life when you were three, four and seven. Particularly 7, because both your child and your sister are seven and the might represent aspects of the seven-year-old you.

You “wake up” at four in the morning, suggesting that something important might relate to being four, and that you are awakened “for school” perhaps cluing you that some sort of new learning is in order. Your chest had been “hurtin” and this could mean “heart-ache” (i.e. emotional pain) and the “pipes” for the “water” are “busted” could mean the heart feels broken, and the water is like feelings and emotions. A worker “step” on a fitting and the “step-mom” could mean some hurt connected with step-mother.

The “deck” might relate to a ship (ships have decks) and the fact that water turns out to be below the deck might confirm this. Boys and men jumping into holes of water could be about how your boy is becoming three, an age when he bonds with dad, and you may be feeling a little left out or abandoned. The water and the hole could be like the earth mother who is is like an angry mother earth swallowing up her boys because she feels rejected (heart-ache, stepped on, sad, overwhelmed with responsibility).

Then there is the part where “no one will take your baby.” This could be both a feeling of being rejected (the baby would be your baby self, and perhaps feelings that you’re not wanted, loved, or good enough; if that’s true you must know we all feel that way sometimes, so you’re not alone; in fact the dream is trying to help you be conscious and aware “to wake up” so that you don’t have to feel sad, alone or heart broken—especially if YOU understand your baby-self’s feelings).

Finally, at a collective level, perhaps this dream is about how the feminine aspects of the world have been stepped on, and how the “girls” have to wake up and take care of the babies, not alone, not in shame and hurt, but together. This is not just about women, it’s about men learning to fix the watery (feelings) ways of the world and for the group (you have people you don’t know in the dream) come together. All hands on deck… just in time for the deck itself (the ships men build, like the Titanic) to fall apart in favor of the earth. Perhaps the earth is the ship and we’re all on it together. Perhaps we humans are ready to “wake up” and take better care of our kids, our earth and each other?

Sometimes a lot of people start dreaming the same dream, and that’s when big change happens. The good news is that everyone makes it in your dream, and all is okay. This is about transition or change, about seeing, and feeling and connecting in new ways.

The very fact that you found this blog and shared your dream and connected with me in this way would not have been possible in the past. Sometimes it’s not so much what we do as the way we do it. Let’s pay attention to our dreams, our children and our natural world with sensitivity, compassion and loving kindness and see, if like a rising tide, we may collectively arrive at a better world that we don’t just wait around for, but wake up to and make happen.

I awoke this morning to my own screaming and crying because I was to late!!! I have had a belly ache since this. My 7 yr old son, my fiance, and I went camping, this was a public camp, and my boy found this “fort” (grass and trees) and inside this fort was like a grass bed. Close to some water. He comes to me in my dream to show me something (i believe it was this fort) and his eyes are heavy like he is sleepy. In my dream what feels like a couple hours go by I become concerned as to his whereabouts, I start frantically searching for him, and the first place i think to look is this fort. As we go out looking for him the tide has come in and in that instant I KNOW that he has fallen asleep in there and something is wrong, as we get closer we can see something floating in the water, As I get closer my baby was floating in the fetal position eyes open with complete rigor mortis. I try to perform CPR but he is just to hard and I began screaming hysterically and crying which eventually wakes me completely Im feeling so distraught! Glad to see I am not that alone.

We went camping, My 7 year old son, fiancé, and self. There was this lake and trees just beautiful. We were hanging out, and notice this flag down this little hill there’s a patch of brush or group of bushes, its hollowed out kind of looks like a “fort”. We go in there, and it has a grass bed for a person. Kinda cool really. Anyhow end up back indoors relaxing. My boy comes in this room to show me something, a painting I believe. What feels like hours, maybe only a couple, I’d guess. I become extrememly concerned about my baby. I don’t hear him. I cant find him. Starting to panic I go outside. A girl I went to highschool with is outside. Im like have you seen Jude and she says “No, I haven’t”. She and I call his name twice, when it dawned on me that his eyes looked heavy when he came and showed me that painting like he was sleepy… he doesn’t answer I just know he is asleep in that fort. So we head down toward this flag, and there is a huge puddle the “tide” has come in and the fort was almost under water. Well the girl that I went to school with was like I see something what is that and you cant really tell yet But we real its a shirt. My son was in there so I jumped in immediately grabbing the shirt and he is rolled up like in a fetal position in complete rigor mortis with his eyes open all white, blue, and dead!!!!!!! I get him out and try to do CPR he is just to hard I began screaming and crying all over the place. This is what eventually makes me wake! I have only had this dream once. I do not want to ever again. I am glad I found this site is has helped me get through the day. I get sick to my stomach thinking my baby even looked like that.

If you read through the other dreams you will see many to do with children drowning and some different ways of thinking about it. To this I might add some ideas about your personal dream:

A “fort” is a place of protection. Your child could symbolize your own child self and “falling asleep” could symbolize lapsing into a state of lesser consciousness, and this could possibly signify a response to overwhelming feelings like loss or trauma.

Consider whether you had any losses or traumas when you were seven, or even when you were still in your mother’s womb (symbolized by a dead child in the fetal position in water). For example might your mother have lost a pregnancy when you were seven, and then become depressed and left you feeling forgotten? That’s just a random guess, but perhaps it will prompt you to realize something about the past, as your dream is more an emotional memory of loss than any predictor of the future.

The “flag” you notice could symbolize a form of identity (more personal than national) and it alerts you to the place of the fort, as if your unconscious has flown the flag to get your attention.

A “bed of grass” could symbolize connecting deeply with mother earth, the archetype of the Great Mother, and a return to the waters of “death” or non-being (i.e. whatever consciousness one has before one is born into this world of attaching and losing, of love and life and death). A “grass bed” could also symbolize taking comfort in grass, and since it leads to the death of the inner child figure, it begs the question about smoking weed or using substances to avoid reality, which leaves kids (inside and outside) at risk.

Finally, the symbolism of a child dying can also be a way that the unconscious helps us grow up; the child who won’t grow up is like Peter Pan, and symbolically that kid (or our identification with that child) must “die” in order for our new identity as parents/grown-ups to be “born” into lived reality.

As you know, birthing a child is not the same as truly parenting a child, and that is a lot of joy but also a lot of stress, expense, exhaustion and frustration. No wonder a part of you just wants to lay down and sleep… Hopefully you shall find that your deep Self is guiding you to more life and love and not death and loss. If there ARE past traumas, find a way to heal, but in any event I certainly wish you…

I had a horriable dream it was really strange first me and my fiancee of 7yrs my childrens father had sperated and i went to see him at his new place i guess it had been a while since we seen each other and that was a very odd metting but then our children just appeared back into the picture and bad things kept happening when my fieance was suposed to be keeping an eye on one or both of them. well bad things almost happened i was always there right before they could end badley. But it ended with me running back to the new place because i had asked for the uptenth time where are the kids he says their fine so i go back can’t find them anywhere i end up running up like a man made hill with a iron structure and landing/ railing and i see his room mate so i call down to him to call steve i cant find the kids i had lost my phone somewhere along the way. the roommate is kinda freaking out i guess they were supposed to be watching the kids so i run around back again and see signs like toys and i think my sons shirt that s when i i looked over my shoulder to my left and seen a little cliff like a 3 to 4 ft drop but there was water i just keep saying no no no and look into the water it was clear and was daytime out though it had been going on dark when i was first looking for them then it seems like im really sluggish i cant move fast and i see my son lying on his left side in the water with out a shirt or shoes he looks like hes sleeping but i know thats not the case i start to run to him and when i jump in the water i see my daughter out of the coner of my eye close to her brother and im just overwhelmed with grife and dread i knew my babes where gone then i wake up i had fallen asleep with my daughter in my arms and my son at my feet on the sofa any ideas it was 3 in the morning the usual time i wake up from wierd dreams but this one was to much no going back to sleep im still shaken up from it 2 hours later

A few thoughts on this dream might begin with wondering how you feel about having a fiance for seven years? Perhaps you do not feel secure in this relationship and the way the children are treated is a symbolic way to understand how you feel. From this angle you confront a “man made hill” (which could symbolize the “obstacle” your fiance has made, at least in your unconscious mind, to you all being safe and together. Then you see your child “lying” (maybe you feel lied to?) on his “left side” (the “side of you” that feels “left” or abandoned).

Although all too common in our current culture, perhaps you feel like a single mom and you are overwhelmed by the responsibility without feeling of support? The water could symbolize feelings, tears, the Mother and/or the unconscious.

Another way to wonder about this dream is in relationship to your past. The cliff is “3 to 4 ft drop” and this could possibly mean that you felt “dropped” when you were 3 or 4. Maybe your dad left your mom around then? Maybe something made you feel like you emotionally died or felt traumatized as a child; perhaps this dream shows how you felt not safe and not supervised as a kid.

Maybe the pain of your past threatens to become the pain of your children’s future. One way to engage this dream is to commit to being there for your own self SO that you can be there for your kids. If your fiance is not there as much as you like, see who can be there (friends, family, community) and maybe imagine your dream and pulling your kids out of the water and imagining them coming back to life and you telling them: I know you are the child parts of me, and I see your pain and I am here for you and we are actually alive right now and even if you weren’t safe as a kid, I can, and will, do everything possible to keep myself and my actual children safe.

Maybe this is our collective prayer, that all our babies can be safe and protected, even if we were not. When kids are hurt it is always unfair. If we show up for all our kids we break the cycle of abandonment and hurt.

Hello Bruce,
I have just read all these postings and your replies. I found this site 2 hours ago after waking up from a nightmare. I am hoping that you can provide insight for me as you have so kindly done for others experiencing these nightmares.
I have had the most stressful year of my life thus far, so I am sure it contributes. I have my own company that I have just sold- days ago. This business has been great for us financially but deprived me of being with my boys,I worked 16 hour days 6-7 days a week and has taken its toll over the past 5 years. So I know that I am experiencing “mothers guilt”… Of not being there, missing so much and forcing them to grow up quickly. I have always had nightmares as I was sexually assaulted at age 17, so I do have OCD about safety things. I am paranoid about safety precautions, preparing for every situation that I possibly can. I am almost 40 now, so I have handled nightmares for some time. I also had a traumatic event with my youngest son, he fell into my moms pond, almost drowned….my step dad heard him splash and ran out and pulled up up by his foot. He is still scared of water.( he was almost 4 when this occurred)
I had an extremely disturbing bad dream about my boys ( ages 13,14) we were on a cruise ship, and something happened and we ended up in the water. I am trying to hold onto both boys but we are all sinking, I lose grip of my youngest son and watch him fall faster to the dark depths. I have both hands now on my oldest son we are holding our breath and we are staring into each others eyes. The water moving our hair into our faces, I can see the panic in his face, and there is absolutely nothing i can do, totally powerless and I know we are going to die, then woke up, crying and didn’t sleep for days. I was afraid to see the ending of that bad dream. It was traumatic for me. I had a hard time of thinking of anything else for a week. I just wanted to hold them and not let go….
However tonight, I was only asleep for an hour… And in my dream I hear a slight noise in the house and wake up in the dream and am looking at my son from above, like the google satellite images. I see a guy come into his room and start stabbing him 6-7 times in the torso. His eyes are open, and the sheer look of fear on his face , and i couldnt help him, this is tearing me apart as I type this….. I can’t stop crying. Once I awoke thinking immediately that this just occurred I jumped out of my bed and headed for his room. It turned out our dog was scratching at the back door, which is probably what really woke me, or even caused sounds that in my dream sent my mind on an excursion. I am still distraught regardless. My boys are the most important thing in my life, and having these bad dreams of something bad happening is taking its toll on me.
As these aren’t the only bad dreams. Just the most recent. I apologize for the long story and background, but thought it would help with possible insight to the interpretation. I appreciate any feedback!

The timing of these dreams seems significant. You have just sold your company (congrats on that), but it was in some sense also “your baby.”

While parenting is a privilege and a blessing, it is also exhausting and sometimes very disturbingly provocative, especially when we carry unresolved trauma (as you likely do from being sexually assaulted).

Perhaps one way to look at the dream is that now that you have cashed out on your hard work you are expected to go on a cruise (symbolic for kicking back and celebrating, but also a journey to the watery part of the world—to feelings and the unconscious, to our own relationship with the Great Mother, the ocean itself within us).

The ship is sinking, symbolic of the bigger self that looks like it is grand and strong, but has been torn below the surface (the assault, the stabbing in the second dream). The Titanic of ego is sinking into the truth of Self.

You have trouble “getting a grip” on your child (on getting a grip on your child self and her wounds); under the water (in the unconscious of Truth, of Love, of what really matters) you see hair (symbol of feelings, textural, animal, sensual, but also symbol of thoughts, which grow out of our heads). The kid hair and the mom hair are a tangle of undulating obfuscation of faces, of facing the dire situation of your child self (i.e. your assault, and other things in your childhood likely felt like you were dying).

As you strive to heal, you must come back into your body, into the terror that sent you out of your body… and make your way safely through that (here a trained mental health professional in a private consultation might be in order; as well for your child to process the trauma of nearly drowning if and when they might care to discuss that with someone).

You are awakening to the beauty of your life, thus you must find a way to understand and relinquish the shipwreck that was the past. Trauma’s repeat sometimes in families. Perhaps you too had a trauma around age 4?

In any event, your tears are probably good, as you are feeling your feelings and this is part of healing, so long as you stay with your body and not so much with your racing mind. In fact, the dream could be seen as a way to make pictorial sense of the way your body already feels when frightened, but of exactly what it is not sure.

I hope this helps and certainly wish you and your family well in resolving traumas of the past and relishing the life that you currently live.

Bruce, thank you so much for your insight. It feels better coming from someone on the outside observing. I really do appreciate the time you took to help me understand what I am possibly experiencing subconsciously. As you detailed the events of my visions in my nightmares and the images I found emotionally disturbing really is enlightening, and I can understand your explanation clearly, through the emotions I am having, there is a reason I am creating these images. I don’t know of any trauma of when I was 4 except that’s when my parents divorced, however I have no memories or recall that event. I have to tell you that I feel you are gifted in this arena, and it has to be your calling. I have never posted on any forum or venue such as this in my life, I was in a dark place and really needed help understanding. So I am very grateful that I found your site, and you are so kind to share your talents to help so many people. Again, I thank you!

Hi. I recently had a dream where my daughter and I were at a beach at night. I told my daughter (she’s 13) not to go on the boat, but she told me arrogantly that “She could see clearly where the boat was and that she would not fall into the sea.” But as I had predicted in the dream, she tried to go on the boat, but missed the deck. She fell into the sea, and started drowning. A man had jumped off the boat to save her, and I stood there screaming and crying for help. He brought her back to shore, and I gave my daughter CPR. When she awoke, she was very sick. And then I woke up. If you could interpret this for me, I’d be very grateful. Thanks.

If you read through the other dreams you’ll see many related to drowning. What I might add here would be taking the dream as a map of your own Self, parts, feelings and inner conflicts.

The beach could symbolize that place where the conscious mind (land) meets the unconscious (sea). The dream is set at night, suggesting a situation in which no one can see clearly due to darkness.

Your daughter might represent the child part of you, and at 13 she is challenging you and this might also be bringing to mind life when you were this age. Perhaps you thought you knew better back then and got into some difficult situations that were “over your head” so to speak.

Now you want to protect your kid from your own pain, and in waking life she may be in conflict with you because she wants to live her own life and doesn’t see the relevance of your life, even if you see it as wisdom. This situation is very “Little Red Riding Hood” where the girl emerging into sexual age gets into danger by thinking she knows what she’s doing when she doesn’t.

The drowning part could represent how you feel in parenting a teen, and/or how you felt AS a teen. The man who saves your girl would represent the brave and powerful part of you, although you currently identify with a weak position (“I stood there screaming and crying for help”).

This male aspect has the power to save, revive and awaken your “girl” self; perhaps to help integrate the mother, the rescuer and the child who needs help into one coherent person.

That your girl was “very sick” from this experience might reveal your fear for yourself and the idea that “something might be “wrong” (sick, unwell, traumatized, etc.) with the child part of yourself.

My hope is that by thinking consciously about this dream, and being compassionate to all aspects of yourself, you may find that your unconscious is guiding you to heal and grow.

After I had two disturbing dreams, I found your website. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to each of the posts.

First, I’m 47 mother of one son, married 26 years.
My first nightmare was two nights ago. All I recall was that there was a duck that was in a lake, my son at current age 20, was in trouble but wanted to help the duck. Someone was after him and I told him to run, it was dusk. He got caught in these plants on the edge of the water and they would twist around his legs.. Entangling him. He disappeared from my sight and I knew something was wrong. The others that came to look for him said he was ok because he was not a kid and they left. I kept looking for him. I found him half submerged in the waters edge. Some time must had passes because when I pulled him out of the water he was stiff and he had a look of pain on his face. I felt within the dream that unbelievable emotion of facing your child’s death. It was intense and very physically real. When I woke I knew I had dreamed. But I still felt the physical and emotional effects.

2nd dream the next night. I dreamed that my father was coming into my bed and caressing me. I knew I was disgusted. But I didn’t stop it because it began to turn me on. I felt ashamed for feeling that was and the next day volunteered as a midwife and would make milk come in to nurse others babies. Except one breast began to make blood. The other wouldn’t make anything.
I woke up.
Strange dreams. I hope you can give me some insight.

I am increasingly humbled by these dreams, increasingly wanting to be of service and admitting that I really am not sure.

I can share some associations and see if it helps. The duck could be a symbol of the ugly duckling, thus a symbol of transformation (Duck Lake wanting to become Swan Lake?). The lake might be the great mother (perhaps the one who birthed you, but brought pain and blood as well as milk and honey?).

I would view your son in the dream as the part of yourself you love the most, but still the part that must die as a boy to be born as a full grown-up. He gets caught up in the weeds at the water’s edge. For this I would review the story of Narcissus, but in short the clueless human does not fall in love with herself but with an imagined stranger—as if the so-called “ugly” duckling doesn’t realize that she is a swan… and then grows into a plant, transfixed at the water’s edge.

This takes us to the second dream, raising the horrid question about sexual trauma (or emotional). Sometimes children actually are abused, but sometimes incest imagery becomes a way of imagining the way something felt.

You describe a sort of overwhelming experience where the sexual pleasure and the overwhelming power of the father conspire to steal the soul of the child. You could think of your dream as an invitation to call the soul back to your own body, taking the victim projection back from the son, and the victimizer projection back from the father, and striving to integrate these two opposites within your own psyche.

These are big tasks and it can be helpful to know that we all struggle with them. If there is actual trauma in your past you would be well-served to address it, perhaps with a therapist or other helper. But we don’t want to go on witch hunts either and confuse the dream world with the waking world.

If you can, maybe you will be able to use your imagination to talk to these figures—the duck, the weeds, the son in your own mind and the father too, asking what each wants, needs and feels (as they are parts of you).

You become a midwife (a helper in birthing new consciousness?). You attend to the many babies, perhaps the purpose of how you have learned to love, to soothe to give pounds of flesh and your own symbolic blood for the love of your child. You have given blood to make your child, that’s the breast that gives life beyond nursing. The other breast gives nothing… maybe it’s the one that’s just for you now?

Well, I was abused sexually by my grandfather at a very young age. I have been in therapy not only for that but for my husbands betrayal of our marriage. I have not been able to forgive my grandfather and perhaps I know I should. But I made very bad life choices because I felt dirty unworthy and unloved. At the same time I never told my parents until two years ago as part of my healing. They were supportive. My grandfather has been dead years. Cone to find out he also tried to molest my brother. And neither one of us told. I feel angry and betrayed by men. Lately my son and I have fought constantly every time he comes home from college. To the point I don’t like being around him. Brings back the memories of the hateful man my husband was to me. We worked through it. At least I guess I’m trying to work through it. I felt I had to protect my mom and grandmother from my monster grandfather and my son who was a teenager from his hateful father. He went to therapy for sexual addiction and we are very happy. Or am I. Does this give any insight to my dreams.

Firstly, I am very sorry to hear that there was abuse and then shame and then subsequent pain, but you sound like you have found courage to heal and you have given your son so much better than you got.

The painful facts seem to reaffirm the importance of integrating the parts of you that may have been sealed off or prevented from growing or being expressed in the past. It’s good to work on these things with your therapist, perhaps bringing the dream (and new dreams that you might get along the way) as evidence about what your unconscious might still be experiencing.

The “unbelievable emotion of facing your child’s death” is a very good way of expressing the way the abuse was like a death, as often we leave our body and float above such overwhelming horror.

Our brains can heal, our hearts can heal, and you seem brave and loving to do the very hard work of breaking the cycle of abuse. It sounds like you are doing things right, after terribly wrong things happened to you—my hope is that time and self-expression and eventual forgiveness (which does not in any way excuse the abuse) may conspire to help you become increasingly safe and free within your own Self.

Maybe your words, and your experiences, may inspire others to also heal. With greater consciousness, and compassion at the level of all parents toward each other and all kids, the multigenerational cycles of abuse may be broken and better days unfold for our children and our grandchildren.

my older sister had a dream that her,myself,and our middle sister was on a air mattress in the middle of a dark lake or creek water type. when my middle sister fell into the water drowning and then she said that i fell also and was drowning. my older sister was in the middle of the air mattress still just watching us drown panicking trying to save the both of us but couldn’t. when she finally saw/pulled us up ,myself and my middle sister had a bullet hole in our head. so not only did myself and my middle sister drown but we were also shot in the head.so what could my sister dream mean.

This dream is probably mostly about your older sister’s psychology, suggesting that she has some unresolved resentment toward you and your middle sister.

No worries, I trust that your older sister loves you very much and your middle sister.

However, the dream suggests that your childhood was not perfect (but then who has had a perfect childhood? Or what would that actually be?)

An air mattress suggests a psychological state as if on a cloud, away from the earth element. The water element connects with the mother and the unconscious, thus it sounds like at least your older sister might have experienced mother as difficult, perhaps she felt like she had to be a mother to her younger sisters.

To be loved is to be deeply known, thus the sisters in the dream would be the younger aspects of your older sister’s own self that feel like they are both drowned (i.e. subsumed in the needs of mother) and their thinking function is impaired (i.e. shot in the head).

The dream is about a feeling of helplessness, but also about protecting herself (in an air mattress is like being in a bubble—unable to save her younger self, but perhaps also protected from further harm).

Being in an air mattress, away from the drowning could be a way that your sister’s psyche represents some sort of trauma, as we sort of leave our bodies when fear or pain are overwhelming.

Sometimes a part of us has to die in order for a new part of us to be born, or more precisely (in psychological terms) our identification with some victimized or immature part of our self must become recognized and integrated into our full personality so we can move forward.

Perhaps your sister was so disturbed about having unconscious aggression toward you and your sister that she felt guilty and worried and thus told you her dream and then you are seeking solutions to your sister’s pain.

It would probably be quite healing, if it were true, for you to tell you sister that you recognize that she has had pain and anger and you are sorry if you have contributed to that in any way, and that you also have had pain and anger and forgive your sister(s). Then if the three of you can come to both recognize your mother and father’s limitations, accept that there has been pain there too (there always is some, so it seems) and forgive them for whatever it was you become freer and more alive.

If you manage to do this then get ready for soon your children will tell you how you have hurt them. If instead of denial you acknowledge, apologize (without undue guilt) we move into more real, less perfectionistic relating.

Finally, it strikes me (without any particular basis to suppor it) that we could think about this dream as having collective resonance in which the “older sister” could represent our parents (no matter how old we are) generation, the middle could be our own generation (whatever era in which we live, boom, x, y, etc) and the younger could represent our children’s generation (i.e. whatever we both leave behind, but also in some sense become… eventually).

If the Older (i.e. wisdom, maturity) is helpless to protect the present and the future, perhaps such consciousness itself might end the tragic cycle of violence, alienation and general douche-baggery that has so seemed to typify life on planet earth in terms of war, pollution, greed, lying and fame-for-fame’s sake—the lurid narcissism that would seem to elevate the self-important and leave the great vast sea of the kind and the quiet scratching their heads as to why this is so.

My fantasy is that more of us might realize that we are quiet, nice and actually do want the best for everyone; but also that very many more of us than we might imagine see things roughly the same way. If someone truly wants the best for others and wants to live a good life and is willing to say we are sorry when we accidentally hurt others because of our own hurt, shame, unconsciousness, etc. perhaps some odd tide of consciousness, which I have thought of as a feminine principle (inspired by Jung’s thinking, and having little to do with gender and much more to do with compassion and empathy and a vision for a world that is more fun and less tacky) might rise organically.

Who can say for sure. It doesn’t hurt to dream, especially if we pay attention to those dreams and meet in the space of thinking, sharing, feeling and connecting in the service of whatever dream weaves us together.

I just wanted to find out some information for my fiance’s dream. She keeps having dreams where she has to save 3 to 5 children but they are her own kids. We just found out she was recently pregnant in November. The past couple of days she has been having nightmares that are different situations but she still has to save the kids. the most recent nightmare is where she is in a warehouse of some sort and there is water that has flooded the building almost all the way to the ceiling. There are wires that are hanging from the ceiling that the kids are hanging onto and she has to find a way to save them. She never has finished the dream because she wakes up in a panic. I’m really concerned about what might be going on and what it symbolizes.

Although the best way to explore dreams is through a sort of creative process, I can offer some ideas and you can share them with your fiance.

Symbolic death is also connected to symbolic birth or renewal. Thus your fiance, in getting ready for motherhood, faces the death of her “inner child” or more accurately, the death of her identification with the child so a new identity as wife and mother can be born.

I would ask her to think about what the numbers 3 and 5 mean to her, but possibly they are hints about things she felt or experienced at those ages; possibly they can be symbols of how you will go from a couple (2) to a family (3) and perhaps the other two symbolize your pets, her parents, the three children total she hope, or intuits, might arrive in the future?

A warehouse could be a symbol for a collective Self, a larger psychology than the individual. In expanding her body to house a growing baby, she may feel like a warehouse filled with water (the water could be the womb fluids, but it could also symbolize the Great Mother Herself, the ocean from which we all emerge and to which we all return, symbolically speaking).

The wires could symbolize the umbilical cord and how the children connect to the warehouse of the uterus.

The fact that it is a nightmare may be about how your fiance is struggling to integrate her conscious feeling (joy at love, marriage and motherhood) and her unconscious feeling (of loss, fear, drowning).

This is a good time for you and your fiance to think about your past, about the family history, about where we all are as humans regarding parenting and community. I think babies are meant to be brought into this world in a context of family and safety, yet many women (and some men) feel like they are in this alone, and this makes babies and responsibility overwhelming and makes us feel like we must save others while the Titanic of our culture feels like its sinking.

Perhaps there is a better way? Perhaps it begins with compassion (i.e. my thoughts on interpreting the dream could translate to you putting your arms around your fiance and letting her know that you are in this with her, she is not alone, and if either of you had pain and suffering in your own childhoods you band together in love and consciousness to give a better experience to your child or children).

Trust that tears can be a good thing, they are often about loneliness and overwhelm; if we can use our tears to create bonds of compassion and trust and honesty, perhaps our kids will benefit and we too will live better lives than the anxious, competitive, all too often hollow and lonely lives too many of us have been floundering in.

Hi my name it’s Wanda and I’ve been having alot of strange dreams lately but i can’t remember most of them i just know i feel horrible when i wake up. But i do somewhat remembe one egger me and my daughter were out walking and she fell through a cattle guard and was drowning and no matter how hard i tried i just couldn’t reach her and she was drowning in the water inside ofit and i woke up scared and crying what does it mean?? Thank you

You might read through some of the other dreams in which I discuss possible meanings of water and drowning dreams, but this seems pretty common. The idea of a cattle guard is interesting, as cattle could represent meat or dairy—that which dies and is eaten or that which gives milk (a mother figure possibly).

One way of looking at it is that a cattle guard would be the symbolic line between the human part of us and the animal aspect. The child falls through, maybe symbolizing a poor boundary or psychological line between you and your child, or between the animal and the human part of self.

Drowning and water could symbolize a sort of return to the womb, to an unconscious state of being. Maybe you feel like you were unprotected as a child and fell through the cracks of your caregiver’s neglect? Maybe you feel like parenting is hard and you struggle to protect your child and keep her safe?

It might not hurt to imagine the dream and being able to successfully get the baby out of the water, safe from the cattle and then imagine asking the child (who is a symbol of your self) what she wants or needs you to understand about her. Depending on your sense of play and imagination you could ask the cattle as well, the strong animal natural aspect if they have some sort of animal wisdom for you.

As I see in so many of these dreams, the symbolic death of children is not the same as actually losing them, but more a way of understanding that some old way of being or of thinking has to die for a new way to come into being. That could be a fancy way of saying that your child aspect needs to come up out of the mud and the water and the animal place and grow up into her best self as a woman and a mother.

Keep in mind the dreamer himself or herself is the best interpreter of the dream, but I’m glad you shared here and hope my ideas spark some new one of your own.

Well I had a dream at first I was with my dog me and her woke up in the middle of the city by a bus stop station I remember seeing my father after that he was healthy just working forgot what he said anyway went to the pawn shop I remember taking a necklace that was easy to take and the lady screaming but me and my dog got away we was taking a look at it next thing I know we by the great falls just a couple blocks from downtown and I was with my sister and my daughter and my dog when we was about to cross the bridge we seen the water passing over the bridge but the bridge was different normally it’s straight to go across the fall not anywhere close to the rapid flowin river towards the fall but this time it was across the river it was like a half a inch over the wood planked bridge we we walk towards it and I’m like na lets go back and when we was walking back to land my daughter just let go of my hand and vanished in the water I’m like What the hell where she go is she at the bottom and instantly woke up out the dream… My thoughts after reading a couple things where karma. Could it be that if I decide to steal anything I could loose my daughter as karma? I don’t kno but I’m still kind of shook.. Not lot ago I just got a valentines day card from her thru my phone I’m currently banned out of America and stuff because of issues with my record but anyway I hardly see her but we speak a lot and video cam when we can… What could it be?????

It sounds like in “real life” you have the pain of not actually getting to see your daughter and this could be the central meaning of your dream.

It starts with you and your dog, and the dog could be a symbol for the natural part of us that is loyal, but not responsible for thinking.

You are at a bus stop, which might be symbol for the place we join the group and go in the direction that we want, which is not walking or a personal car… symbolic perhaps of getting along with the group and the rules of society.

You see your dad and he is healthy, which could symbolize the parent part of you getting to see the kid, which is you compared to your dad.

The pawn shop is next, symbol of a place where people give up what they value because they are desperate, or a place people go looking for bargains (and who don’t mind the karma on the objects they buy). You steal a necklace, which might symbolize that you feel that you cannot get what you value (your daughter) by honest means and are desperate to have it. A necklace adorns the neck, the place that connects, but also divides, head and heart.

The screaming lady would by your inner shaming voice who criticizes you but does not teach you how to do better.

Now you face the bridge and the falls. This could symbolize the path you must follow to get from your current situation to the one you want: happy, with your daughter, safe and loved.

But the situation shows the inner dilemma: the water (symbol of the tears you have cried? or of the Mother, or perhaps the Unconscious which is powerful) threatens to block the crossing of the bridge. The water is too high and strong, meaning you feel overwhelmed and the bridge is not high enough (it is a level of consciousness not yet high enough to be able to safely cross the river of feelings). The bridge is like thinking and the river like feeling; your heart swamps your mind, and in this situation you lose your grip on your girl (who symbolizes the child you once were, the place where your emotional troubles possibly began, back when what you were asked to do was too much for you, and might have felt like trying to cross a mighty river on a flooded bridge).

Read some of the other dreams above, I like this one about rescuing the daughter from a similar dream situation:

My hope is that your dreams will bring you encouragement to heal and follow the path that is truly right for you… and that this will bring you into better relationship with all the parts of your inner Self and with your real daughter too.

Until then, you know that you are always connected with your daughter in your heart, and she is your great motivation to choose well so you can be your best Self as an act of love for her. The dream helps us know how hard it can be, but it also teaches you that you don’t have to deal with everything alone (sister, dad and dog will all help).

I had this dream a few weeks ago and have not stopped thinking about it ever since, and was hoping I could get some kind of an interpretation.

In the dream, my husband and I are getting married. We were at the hotel where the wedding was being held, and the bodies of young women kept showing up in the hotel rooms. The police would come investigate, but didn’t know who it was.

Fast Forward and it was revealed that the killer was my husband. He forces me and our daughter in the car as he escaped from the police. We are driving down a curvy road in the mountains and there is a lake to the right. As we are driving he is talking to me about how it will all be over soon and we will all be together forever. I can tell he is planning on killing himself and taking our daughter and me with him. Trying to find a way out of the situation and save my daughter and myself, I try to convince him to go to a hotel and rest, and that in the morning we will all “go together”. He agrees, and I feel a weight off my shoulders, But suddenly there is a gap in the guard rail on the road, and he swerves the car into the lake.

As the car is sinking, I struggle to get my seat belt off and get myself and my daughter out of the car. Finally, I get both of us out of the car, but my daughter is in the water about 2 feet away from me, so I try and swim to get her to go to the surface. But just as my hand goes to grab her, my husbands hand reaches up from the sinking car and grabs her foot and drags her into the darkness of the water. This was the moment I woke up.

The dream really terrified me, and I have been looking for an explanation for weeks now, but have not found anything that makes sense. My husband and I have a great relationship, we love each other very much, and my husbands relationship with our 3 yr old daughter is wonderful as well. So you can see why it does not really make sense.

As a former screenwriter we have to give hats off to your unconscious for crafting a such a compelling horror story, and yet I am sorry that you have been so disturbed by the contents of your unconscious.

My hope is that perhaps if we come up with a coherent interpretation it might unlock your feeling of dread and disturbance.

As you might notice from the dreams already shared in this space, drowning is a very common theme, one quite likely related to random firing of neurons conveying a feeling of sinking, which the narrative brain senses and then spins into a narrative as it prefers a story of terror to nameless, imageless dread.

That said, the contents and symbols of the dream might relate to the themes envy, competition and loss. Let me explain: taking the dream as a representation of your own Self, all the elements might then be re-envisioned as symbols standing in for seemingly contradictory emotions and impulses, particularly “forbidden” elements relating to the Shadow, or destructive power-wielding aspect of the psyche.

In this perspective we have a hotel, symbol of a collective self where many people go and many things happen, but particularly rest and sexual situations. The fact that you are getting married in the dream could symbolize the wish to know that you are still favored, desired and adored in waking life; but in the dream the husband would be a symbol of your own male aspect: that which adores you, but also that which might be a “bad guy”—the part of yourself you would not readily acknowledge or identify with.

Bodies of YOUNG WOMEN keep showing up, perhaps suggesting an unconscious anxiety that as you age your husband might lose desire for you. If you are the unconscious architect of the dream, perhaps there is a part of you who wants to “kill the young women” because they are rivals, threats to your husband’s affection (remember the husband would be the empowered/dark aspect of you, the part that carries the anger and destruction that you may feel unacceptable as emotions… which then become exaggerated into violence).

I actually suspect that the real rival here is your daughter, for at 3 she must be an adorable princess and she must be in love with daddy. In waking life you celebrate this, but as a mom you work your ass off to take care of her and end up feeling like Cinderella and when daddy comes home it’s a huge love fest and you can end up feeling like the dowdy maid.

This would be forbidden to think, which is often the birth of nightmares… You three escape together (from the police, symbol of the part of you who enforces the rules, fairness and justice). Yet you are outlaws on the road, Bonny & Clyde… and that is sexy, and you are alive and desired (even if it is death the love-object plans… for orgasm in French may be called Le Petite Mort after all).

Now the car goes through the gap in the guardrail. Perhaps the guardrail is a symbol of the protective function, the boundary between road (reality) and water (the unconscious, but also perhaps the Mother). The guardrail also brings to mind the crib railings and the “gap” could symbolize the little space between mom and dad that all children dive into for a snuggle and exploit to get their way.

Perhaps you feel dad sides with daughter sometimes, spoiling and not holding the line on rules? Now you find you all three going down together, showing how some part of you would rather die than be separated from your husband and daughter… rather die together than live alone (remember your unconscious is the author, your ego self in the dream a mere player in the show).

Now the chiller moment, you get the girl out and hope to get to the surface with her (this might symbolize the wish to save the little girl part of you, the part that is killed by becoming a parent and being unthroned in the little girl department by the real little girl). Yet another gloss on this is how the little girl must die in ourselves for the woman to be born in full ernest.

Yet… the husband part of you and the child part are so deeply linked that they will not be separated and his hand grabs her… causing you to wake up: to have a chance at consciousness… to search for my blog, to search for meaning, to confront your own unconscious and the beautiful and painful mystery of how you yearn to be free and you yearn to be held and never let go… like all of us.

This dream does not mean anything bad is going to happen, and it does not mean you are a bad parent or that your husband is a killer. I encourage you to pretend you are back in the dream with this new way of seeing it. You say, “Pull over, you are my inner killer and you hold my power and you love my inner little girl and I am conscious about all this so we don’t need drama and driving into lakes. The cops are my inner cops and we are all in a big play meant to illuminate our total Self…”

Then, ask the killer husband what he really wants, and the daughter too. Since they are you you can assure them that you love them and will never leave them nor can they leave you. Maybe the dream becomes a pleasant adventure and all the dead young girls turn out to be the part of you who has felt killed by the toll parenting takes (but we deny because we’re supposed to just say the “nice things”)… maybe they revive and with them your spirit of sexiness and fun and adventure and power and innocence and trust and abundance and generosity… and once you are in the fairytale things tend to turn out happily ever after.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if I am “right,” only that you feel better and that your dreams become less upsetting and hopefully even sweet.